Intensive agriculture, marketing and social structure: the case of south-eastern Spain

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to analyse the opinions of farmers in the province of Almería concerning the state of the fruit and vegetable sector, to learn about the main considerations in their decision-making processes when marketing their products and their assessment of the image of companies and cooperatives and to analyse the social structure of this collective. To that end, the analysis was conducted on three levels: a descriptive analysis on two levels – a quantitative analysis of the socio-demographic, socio-economic and marketing characteristics of farmers in the province of Almería and a qualitative analysis based on the opinions of farmers and a group of experts in the sector; and an explanatory analysis, based on a binary logistic regression model, to show how decision-making occurs in the marketing dialectic, whether it either be at the source (auction) or the end-point (cooperative). The conclusion is that the marketing variables that are most tied to context – such as price, timeframe or certification – better explain the decision-making process of farmers in the province of Almería when marketing their products, both for cooperative members and for those who sell their products in alhóndigas (traditional auction houses).

An IoT Architecture for Water Resource Management in Agroindustrial Environments: A Case Study in Almería (Spain)

“…Almería (southeast of Spain) is one of the driest regions in Europe, but paradoxically, it has one of the continent's largest agricultural production systems. Such a system is composed of more than 30,000 ha of effective greenhouse production [1], and it has become the main driving force of the economy of this dry region. One basic ingredient of this system is fresh water, so that the development of agriculture in Almería has been associated for many years with the decline of fresh water reservoirs, despite being the agricultural area where the most efficient management of this resource is carried out [2].…”