The mooing of the cows, the singing of the birds and the barking of her faithful dog Luna, are the wake-up calls for Paola García, a proud peasant from the village of Mochuelo Alto, in the town of Ciudad Bolívar.
This Bogota native, community leader, single mother, zootechnician in training and founder of the Peasant Livestock Association of Small and Medium Rural Producers of Bogotá (Asoprogán), spoke with EL NUEVO SIGLO about the importance of the countryside in the city and the support of district entities.
“Here are four generations of my family, we have always dedicated ourselves to field work, livestock and agriculture in this rural area of Ciudad Bolívar, in the Mochuelo Alto village. We love the countryside, we work with love for this land”, says Paola proudly.
Peasant since childhood
Paola emotionally remembers her first approaches to the field, moments she lived with her father and that forged her commitment to this work.
“My most beautiful memories are working on the cattle ranch with my father. In these areas it is very common to hold fairs and livestock markets. My dad always took me, I liked to see how people marketed his cattle and it was from there that I fell in love with this type of contact with people and work with animals, ”Paola shared.
It has always been early. As a girl, she used to leave at five in the morning to cross the mountain and the river with her cows and sheep. Today, she wakes up at 4:30 am to help her father with the milking of the cows, which are the ones that have derived part of her family’s livelihood since her childhood.
Then, in her role as a single mother, she sees to it that her two daughters, aged 14 and 10, arrive at school on time, she leaves the chores done and goes out to her business: a veterinary store that becomes the place of consultation for their neighbors and the place to buy the necessary inputs for the agricultural and livestock practice of that rural area of Bogotá.
Passionate about caring for animals
Paola knows everyone in the village, and despite the fact that she has not finished her animal husbandry degree, which she resumed after 14 years, she has become a leader in her community when it comes to animal care, especially projects ranchers.
“All my life I have been ‘on the tail of the cows’, I grew up in these fields and I love being here. I, like many people in this area, have my dreams here, and I don’t know what my life would be like elsewhere, I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” she says.
For her, being a peasant from Bogota is not easy, but it is “a great pride”; it is resisting a city that grows more and more every day, it is being self-sufficient, it is valuing the land, loving it, it is appreciating and maintaining traditions and fighting to maintain itself over time.
And being from a rural area of Ciudad Bolívar, he points out, is even more difficult. That’s why she insists on staying; she is convinced that her work there, on her sidewalk, can help change the face of a town stigmatized by many factors such as violence and poverty. “But it must be shown that behind those colored houses near the Portal Tunal, in the middle of the hills that surround the south of Bogotá, there is a rural sector, there is a field, there is an area that supplies the city, that sustains it with food. “, says.
The creation of Asoprogane
His leadership in the community was born spontaneously. In his tours of the territory, he saw the needs of the people, of their projects, and he began to imagine how they organized themselves to have better profits.
Her livestock and agricultural training bases made her a kind of veterinarian without a degree; He toured the farms on foot, vaccinated cattle, they told him about the problems that the cows and calves had, and overcoming the machismo that sometimes marks the countryside, he created the Peasant Livestock Association of Small and Medium Producers of Rurality in Bogotá.
At first only three people joined the project, then, with a word of mouth strategy, the organization was legalized with 32 members, and today there are 55.
“It is a great achievement, it has been two years of hard work but it has been satisfactory. We have managed to meet the expectations of the creators and the people. It is a way of showing the city that we can have autonomy to organize and not depend on. We are clear about where we are going and what we want. We have been able to make visible the peasant culture of this area. We aim at sustainable livestock farming, environmental improvement and social work for this land”, he emphasizes.
Among the achievements obtained with the Association that Paola highlights are that milk can be sold at a better price, there is a greater sense of environmental responsibility and they are more productive.
The challenges of the peasantry
Paola points out that, among the challenges of peasants in rural areas of Bogotá, is the displacement to places of study or work located in the city, as is the case of her daughters, who study at a school near Avenida Boyacá in the urban part.
“We cannot clip the wings of our children and young people, we must teach them that the countryside, that our village not only needs professionals related to agricultural or environmental areas, but that they can leave, train, and return as lawyers, architects or digital professionals and work for their land,” he said. This would allow them to be the ones to build modern and ecological buildings, those who defend from the legal area the interests of the community affected by the proximity to the Doña Juana landfill (it is just a couple of kilometers from Paola’s house), or create apparatuses or programs that allow optimizing the work of the inhabitants of the rurality of the capital.
Paola defends the premise that the countryside and the city have a symbiotic relationship, they need each other, and for this reason her dream is that in order for them to continue to exist, she goes ahead and develops a public policy that includes awareness of this codependency. That the farmer is clear that he needs the city to be able to market what he produces and that the urban inhabitant knows that the countryside is his provider.
Thanks to the programs of the Directorate of Rural Economy and Food Supply of the District Department of Economic Development, he has had much more training on good livestock practices; She was also benefited with milking equipment to improve the production of the dairy cows that she has with her parents, and received inputs in seeds for the pastures to improve cattle feeding.