Reconversion of Agri-Food Production Systems and Deagrarianization in Spain: The Case of Cantabria

Abstract

The term deagrarianization refers to the dwindling importance of agrarian activity as the economic and social basis of a rural area. Deagrarianization is reflected in the declining number of people engaged in agricultural production and a reduction in the relative importance of agricultural incomes. In addition to the economic consequences, deagrarianization also erodes the importance of the rural population in territorial organization and management and social functioning in rural areas. However, it is also true that the simultaneous shift towards the service economy in present-day rural economies and societies has not led to the disappearance of the rural space but, instead, given rise to new and multiple forms of rurality. The priority objective of the research on which this paper is based is to gain insight into the rural deagrarianization processes in Spain through the specific case of Cantabria. In order to analyze these dynamics, a series of basic indicators have been used. In order of importance, the main indicators employed were those related to the recent dynamics of agriculture, livestock, and forestry activity and the occupational structure of the population as regards its sectoral distribution, with particular attention being paid to the relative importance of livestock and forestry activities in relation to the direct exploitation of territorial resources. In the past, primary sector activities were very important in Cantabria, but their importance has steadily declined in both absolute and relative terms until reaching the current situation. In 2023, only 4579 people have been employed in agriculture out of a total of 214,574 active people (2.13%). It is very significant that between 2012 and 2021, the total number of employed people increased by 9.08% in Cantabria while the proportion of people employed in agricultural activities decreased by −12.90%. Farming is no longer the rural occupation par excellence; however, it continues to be important in most Cantabrian rural municipalities. The territorial distribution is even more revealing. Southern mountain municipalities can be considered the last stronghold of agricultural activity since, in most cases, more than a quarter of their active population is employed in this sector. These are also the rural areas with the highest levels of depopulation. In contrast, other activity sectors have also gained importance in rural areas, although not in the same way. In general, there is less service economy employment in inland rural municipalities, except in those that are county capitals offering services. Some rural, peri-urban, and coastal areas where tourism is more strongly developed also reach high values.

1. Introduction and Theoretical Framework

Cantabria is a Spanish Autonomous Community that lies in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, in its central sector between the 43°42′ and 42°46′ parallels of north latitude and the 4°48′ and 3°13′ meridians of west latitude. The Cantabrian territory, covering 5329.43 km² (National Geographic Institute, IGN), is located between the Cantabrian Sea to the north, with 284 km of coastline, and the Cantabrian Mountains, which form the southern limit. To the west, it borders the Autonomous Community of the Principality of Asturias; to the east, the Basque Country; and to the south, the provinces of Burgos and Palencia, both belonging to Castile and León. The Cantabrian Autonomous Community is made up of 102 municipalities, comprising some 1000 population entities, and will have a population of 585,402 in 2023 (National Institute of Statistics, INE).

Cantabria, like many other regions around the world, has seen an intense process of transformation of the agricultural production system since the second half of the twentieth century and, above all, in the two early decades of the twenty-first century. These changes are fully linked to the process of contemporary globalization and bear on trends taking place on a global scale and affecting all activity sectors [1,2]. As is logical, agricultural activities have not been left out of processes that, in general terms, favor the relocation and restructuring of agricultural productive companies to the advantage of the largest and most competitive enterprises [3,4], since most family, small, and medium-sized farms cannot compete with large, globalized agri-food companies [5,6,7,8,9,10].

One major socioeconomic transformation that has taken place in many areas is that of “deagrarianization”, meaning a reduction in the importance of agrarian activities in terms of employed population and income and the correspondingly greater weight of non-agrarian forms of occupation [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. The most significant manifestations of this include a decrease in the volume of small and medium-sized farms, a dwindling of areas of agricultural use, livestock herds, and, finally, the transformation of social structures [19,20]. There have been great coincidences in the definition of the concept of deagrarianization, but great differences in terms of the causes that produce it and the socioeconomic and territorial effects it has.

Deagrarianization leads to a progressive loss of traditional ways of life, meaning that agrarian activity ceases to constitute the economic base and main hallmark of rurality. It is a process that responds to the new productive and territorial logics of the globalized economy and has been associated with derealization [21] from a perspective based on the premise—a rather questionable one in our opinion—that the rural environment is fully identified with agricultural activity. Other authors understand that this process, leading to territorial multifunctionality, is connected, but not strictly identified, with the survival of lifestyles based on agriculture as the main sector of employment, the subsistence of peasant societies, and the productive relocation of rural inhabitants [22].

Parallel to deagrarianization processes, many rural areas are being subjected to functional changes that affect economic activities and land uses and are giving rise to the birth of rural areas with different features, specifically for socioeconomic diversification and multifunctionality, which are identified under the polysemic concept of “new rurality” [23,24,25,26,27,28,29]. This is used to define the transformations taking place in rural spaces, although its significance is far from univocal and has a very different meaning when used in Europe than when applied to Latin America [30]. In the first case, the new rurality is understood as a socioeconomic and functional situation of rural spaces that goes beyond the agrarian framework and integrates numerous and different economic activities, without the intention of implying that the process leads to their conversion into urban spaces [31,32].

On many occasions, agricultural activity is seen as a hindrance to development, an outdated, low-tech, and low-profitability activity, thus making it convenient to replace it with more modern and profitable activities [33,34,35]. In apparent contradiction with the above, the loss of socioeconomic and functional importance of agricultural activity usually precedes and even coincides in time with its modernization and intensification, resulting from the technification and mechanization of agricultural tasks and the development of agribusiness. This aspect, in addition to the positive effects related to the increase in demand for raw materials and agricultural products by the industry, usually also has negative consequences linked to an increasing dependence on farms on the conditions imposed by agribusiness.

These processes have been occurring for some time in some rural areas in the most developed countries, in peri-urban and coastal counties, in which deagrarianization is associated with tertiarization processes, especially tourism, but this does not usually apply to inland and mountain rural areas, in which deagrarianization processes—some of them quite intense—are not accompanied by socio-economic diversification, although sometimes rural tourism also begins to develop and become an essential activity of the economic base of these territories [36,37,38,39,40]. The absolute primacy of tourism over agricultural activity in rural areas contributes to the weakening of the economic base of these areas, which are subject to the fluctuations of an activity not controlled by the territory itself, as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 has shown [41].

The socio-territorial transformations of urbanized, peri-urban, and perimetropolitan rural areas have been analyzed in recent decades by various authors [42,43,44,45], some of whom have argued that rural development initiatives can serve to alleviate the excessive growth of urbanized rural areas while also mitigating the economic inferiority of spaces that have usually been considered less developed and analyzed under the double perspective of the absolute primacy of agricultural activity and the small population size of human settlements [46].

However, the impact of deagrarianization processes, when they take place in an uncontrolled way, does not stimulate rural development but can be an additional factor leading to greater economic and territorial regression [47,48]. In this sense, it has been pointed out that the lower profitability of agricultural activities compared to the new activities being implemented should emphasize not only the development of economic and functional diversification strategies but also the improvement of the agricultural rural productive fabric [49].

It should also be taken into account that, in addition to productive functions, traditional and current agricultural systems perform other functions that are based on the contribution of ecosystem services of an ecological, cultural, identity, recreational, or other nature [50,51,52].

Deagrarianization processes have been the subject of analyses regarding different territories worldwide since the last decades of the twentieth century. Such is the case, when it comes to the African continent, of the studies of Bryceson (2000) [53], and in relation to Latin America, the same goes for those by Delgado-Campos (1999) [54], Barsky (2005), Osses et al. (2006) [46], Escalante (2007) [55], Gorenstein et al. (2007) [56], Grammont (2009) [57], Reyes and Acosta (2014) [58], among others.

As concerns Spain, deagrarianization has been cited among the structural causes of the rural exodus in relation to the modernization of agrarian activity [59,60,61,62,63,64,65] and as a form of “rural restructuring”. For this reason, it is often viewed as an effect that is generalized and not exclusive to urbanized rural areas.

The concern with this issue has also been extending recently to European agriculture, whose regressive dynamics, despite or because of the actions of the Common Agricultural Policy, have been the subject of attention in the report El futuro de la agricultura europea ante los nuevos desafíos globales [The future of European agriculture in the face of new global challenges [66]].

In 2022, François Purseigle and Bertrand Hervieu, two sociologists of accredited prestige who specialize in the study of rural spaces, published the book Une agriculture sans agriculteurs. La revolution indictable (Agriculture without farmers. The indictable revolution) on the radical process of “unprecedented” transformation that is taking place in the European agricultural sector. And they have done so through the case study of French rural areas in which farmers have ceased to be the majority to become an “ultra-minority” or even “erased” as small and medium-sized family farms are disappearing and being replaced by large agro-industrial companies (pp. 11–13) [67].

The data from the 2020 Agrarian Census, carried out simultaneously in the countries of the European Union, unquestionably show the speed of the process of radical reconversion of the productive model leading to social and territorial deagrarianization.

In the European territory, in just 15 years, from 2005 to 2020, 37% of farms have disappeared, and the survivors are facing a dramatic future since only 3% of farm owners are under 35 years old, compared to 40% who exceed 64 (Eurostat, Principales explotaciones agrícolas utilizadas por las regiones NUTS 2 [Main farmland use by NUTS 2 regions], 10 January 2023).

The Spanish case is not very different, although the decline in the number of farms in that period of time has been somewhat smaller (14.5%), but it should not be forgotten that the process was already well-advanced at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that European average values are skewed upwards on account of what has happened in the countries of Central-Eastern Europe (Poland, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Slovakia, etc.)1.

Although very briefly, for the Spanish case, some data has been collected and elaborated that can be considered the main indicators to identify the recent dynamics of agricultural activity and that can serve as a reference and contrast with the case of Cantabria analyzed here.

Comparing the data of the Agricultural Censuses of 1999 and 2020, it is verified that the number of farms has decreased in Spain by 48.15%, the Utilized Agricultural Area (UAA) has decreased by 9.23%, and the Annual Work Units (AWU) have lost 26.81%. Only the total number of Livestock Units (LU) has increased by 66.95% as a result of the spectacular growth of large intensive industrial livestock farms in most of the Spanish territory. The equivalent data in Cantabria are −57.40% farms, −17.20% UAA, −59.12% AWU, and −32.82% LU.

Likewise, the contribution of the primary sector to the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has gone from 3.74% in 2000 to 2.47% in 2019 for the whole of Spain, while in Cantabria it has fallen from 4.29% to 1.08% in the same period2. It should also be noted that not all Spanish regions have experienced the same dynamics since, exceptionally, Andalusia has increased the number of its farms by 4.4% in the same period. In contrast, the northern Autonomous Communities, with a predominant livestock orientation, have had a regressive evolution, especially since the decline of milk-producing farms.

At the regional level, very contrasting territorial situations can be observed, since in some cases “reagrarisation” processes can be identified, as occurs in most of the Andalusian territory and, in general, in the Mediterranean regions from the expansion of the olive grove and fruit and vegetable crops, which are highly demanded and profitable, in contrast to the agrarian dynamics of the interior and northern regions. This reduces the value of average general data since it masks very unequal territorial realities.

2. Objectives, Methodology and Materials

The research on which this article is based stems from empirical knowledge of the true agricultural dynamics of Cantabria and theoretical knowledge of the recent processes of transformation in rural areas. Both sources of information have led to the raising of a series of doubts and questions with the intention of finding an answer or, at least, approaching the understanding of this problem in more depth and detail.

The main issues that have been raised as problems to be solved are, among others:

When, where, how, and why is the process of deagrarianization taking place, from a territorial perspective, at the regional level?

Is it linked to the obsolescence stereotypically attributed to agricultural activity or to its modernization and technification, themselves linked to the effects of globalization?

Is deagrarianization a widespread and homogeneous process, or does it affect distinct types of rural areas in a differentiated way?

Does it have different effects in dynamic rural areas, which are characterized by socio-economic diversification, especially tertiarization, than those in regressive rural areas with an economic base of little variety?

Does the concept of deagrarianization always have negative connotations related to the socio-economic crisis of rural areas, or can it have positive connotations in accordance with the modernization of such spaces?

Do the deagrarianization processes identify situations of economic regression and depopulation in rural areas, or are they a result of a previously existing economic and demographic decline?

In relation to the previous interpellations, the general objective proposed by this research work is to make headway in a rigorous and detailed understanding of the rural restructuring that is currently taking place. This is conducted based on a scientific analysis of the way in which the process identified under the concept of deagrarianization as an identity feature of the “new rurality” is taking place.

The essential objective of this research is to verify whether the current dynamics of agricultural activity can and should be identified as a variant of deagrarianization processes or only as the culmination of a modernizing transformation of agri-food production systems initiated in the 1960s of the 20th century. It is also intended to advance in the precise knowledge of the multiple and varied characteristics of these processes, taking Cantabria as a case study, find out what territorial differences, regional and intra-regional, the recent dynamics entail, and, finally, offer an example that can serve as a reference extrapolated to other territories.

It should be noted that the aforementioned general objective includes others that are more concrete and specific and consist of an analysis of the dynamics of agricultural activities in terms of land use in rural areas, the evolution of the number and proportion of people employed in them, and the variation in the economic weight of the primary sector in the gross domestic product of the territory concerned, all of which translate into a change in the importance of agriculture in rural areas while there is usually, but not always, a growth in activities not related to the primary sector.

Based on the most accepted variants of the deagrarianization concept, the research has focused on the main indicators of the process: the evolution of the number of farms, the transformation of their structural characteristics, the dynamics of the used agricultural area, changes in production patterns and of the productions themselves, the progression or regression of work employed on the farms, the contribution of the agricultural sector to the regional Gross Domestic Product, etc.

No attempt has been made to accumulate specific individual reports on each of the aspects addressed, but rather it has been considered the most appropriate objective to treat each of these aspects in a differentiated way and, at the same time, to establish the possible connections and interrelationships among them without ignoring, of course, the incidence of each one of the indicator factors in the deagrarianization process as cause and consequence, sometimes simultaneously.

As it is a geographical analysis, the territorial perspective is of fundamental importance. So, for each of the specific aspects studied, the analysis of the territorial contrasts and differences has been proposed as a complementary objective, referring to the inequalities that the process presents on a district scale, both in its specific characteristics and in the causes and consequences that these various dynamics have from the spatial and socioeconomic point of view.

There are several recent studies at the state and suprastate levels, almost all of them of a strictly statistical nature, through which it is possible to perceive the intensity and generality of the process but not delve into other aspects in greater detail. For this reason, the decision has been taken to work on a smaller territorial scale through the study of a significant case. This has been done through the quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation of the process in the Autonomous Community of Cantabria, one of the regions in which the decline in the agriculturally active population, the reduction of the means of production (farms, cattle, etc.), and the decrease in the contribution in economic terms of the agricultural product to the regional GDP have been most significant within the whole of Spanish territory. The general and specific objectives have also largely conditioned the methodology. On this occasion, it has been decided to carry out an empirical study following an inductive method based on descriptive statistical analysis of several analytical categories and numerous indicators. In addition to the compilation and analysis of the existing literature on agricultural activities in previous times for the purpose of observing and interpreting the dynamics, we have worked with the analytical categories most frequently used in territorial studies to learn about the dynamics and current situation, such as demography, population density, and functional aspects related to economic activities. In addition to these, economic dynamics and accessibility have been considered useful components for understanding recent changes in the rural environment.

Data collection has been carried out from many rigorous and reliable documentary sources, not only for the purpose of complementarity, but also for contrast between them. The most significant of these materials include, but are not limited to, those mentioned below, while others will be identified throughout the text.

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The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has provided the data from the Population Registers and Censuses and the Agrarian Censuses of 1999, 2009, and 2020;

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The Ministry of Transport, Mobility, and Urban Agenda (National Geographic Institute, IGN, and Urban Information System, SIU) has provided data on Land Occupation and Land Use from the projects Corine Land Cover (CLC) and Land Occupation Information System of Spain (SIOSE);

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The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration of Spain (National Institute of Social Security, INSS) has been the source of the 2009–2022 annual average data of Affiliation to Social Security by sector of activity, employment situation, and unemployment, as has the General Treasury of Social Security (TGSS) 2012–2021;

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The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAPA) has made it possible to consult the 2002–2022 Livestock Survey and the data on Forestry Production and value by type of goods, 1945/46-2000;

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The Institute of Statistics of Cantabria (ICANE) has provided, among many others, the data of the Regional Accounts of Cantabria, of the 2000–2022 GDP by sectors of activity, of the Companies and Establishments by main company activity group in Cantabria in 2009–2019, of the prices of land, inputs, agricultural, livestock, and forestry productions, and the municipal distribution of estimated gross and per capita income (Homogeneous series 2011–2019);

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The Ministry of Rural Development, Livestock, Fisheries, Food, and Environment of the Government of Cantabria has provided data on agricultural production, livestock censuses, milk quotas and milk production for industry, livestock marketing, etc.

3. Results

3.1. Previous Dynamics and Situation

The dynamics of agricultural activity in Cantabria in the long term have been studied extensively and in depth for some time by several authors [68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76], so this section is intended only to expose in summary the main characteristics of this evolution in order to highlight the precise conditions that have served as a starting point for the current processes.

For centuries, in most of the territory of present-day Cantabria, livestock activity was one of the priority forms of land use and, consequently, of space organization and landscape modeling. The most widespread production system was of an extensive and collective organization nature and was based on a form of transhumance known as “transterminancia”. Its origin dates to the high medieval period and consisted of seasonal displacement at short distances and at altitude to make optimal use of the best pastures in each season of the year.

Livestock uses constituted the basis of peasant activity and economy; however, tillage and agricultural production also played an important role for centuries, with different weights in the different regions according to their orographic and climatic conditions. The inclusion of new plants, such as corn from the 17th century and the potato, brought with it the intensification of cultivation systems and, therefore, an increase in production and, above all, productivity of the land yields. Agriculture went from the ancestral extensive fallow systems to the intensive, also traditional, alternating plants and crop rotation (bread cereals, fodder cereals, corn, legumes, and/or textiles).

One of the pillars on which agricultural production was based was a promiscuous cattle herd in which herds of bovine cattle, mainly made up of cattle of native breeds, gradually gained precedence. The cattle specialization entailed a transcendental mutation of the rural economy, which became increasingly open and commodified since most of the agricultural production began to be oriented towards the market for the sale of cattle for work in the southern regions.

Subsequently, as the demand for milk for the consumption of the urban population increased, Cantabrian farmers, some of whom established dairy shops in the main Spanish cities, realized that the volume of milk production from native cows, despite its higher fat content, was insufficient to satisfy the needs of the market. This is how, from the second half of the 19th century, cattle of breeds oriented towards dairy production (Swiss brown and Friesian) began to be introduced. From that moment on, a modern livestock activity started to develop, specialized in dairy production and the rearing of dairy cows, stimulated by the demand of industrial companies that pack and manufacture dairy products and supported by the adaptation of the increasingly intensified traditional production system. The factories dedicated to the industrial transformation and commercialization of dairy products established in different places since the beginning of the 20th century, such as those of the multinational company Nestlé, achieved great notoriety. But, in a special way, it was in Torrelavega and its surroundings that a good number of dairy factories were concentrated, to the point of making it the most important production center in Spain until the fifties of the 20th century.

Despite the importance that cattle ranching was achieving in traditional agricultural productions, even at the beginning of the 20th century, tillage activities maintained a great weight and even increased it, not so much to obtain food for the population but for livestock. However, in the second half of the century, the transformation from an agrarian economy based on agricultural production to one specialized in livestock products, particularly milk production, was finally consolidated (Figure 1).

Agricultural production increased its value throughout the 20th century, measured in current pesetas3 (663,785.46%), but with great differences between one agricultural subsector and another. At the same time, there was a fundamental transformation in the structure and composition of agricultural production consisting of the continued loss of importance of agricultural production and the constant growth in the value of livestock production, while forestry barely changed its productive weight. Evolution also presents temporal differences. Thus, agricultural production retained considerable importance until the 1950s, maintaining the value of its production always above 50% of the total value of agrarian production, but from then on there was a continuous decline: from 57%, 54% in 1960 to 6.83% in 2000.

Forestry exploitation has been of great importance in Cantabria, to the point that it is a territory that has suffered deforestation processes for several centuries. First to eliminate trees and convert the land into pastures and meadows for livestock, then to obtain wood to produce charcoal to supply ironworks and primitive blast furnaces, in which iron was produced in large quantities, and for the use of firewood and wood for population use.

Since the mid-19th century, there have also been notorious reforestation activities using two fast-growing species from distant lands: the Monterey or California pine (pinus radiata/pinus insignis) and the Australian eucalyptus (eucaliptus globulus). Later, wood production became increasingly important both in volume and, above all, in value, to the point that wood production has practically reached between 80% and 99%, depending on the year, of the value of total forest production.

In summary, it is evident that the Cantabrian agricultural activity and economy have adopted a purely livestock orientation since the beginning of the twentieth century and, in particular, since the mid-twentieth century.

The data related to agricultural productions support what has been stated up to this point, despite the relative reliability of the data and the temporary gaps they present. In 1929, livestock production had already begun to represent more than 60% of total agricultural production. It is true that an eloquent relative regression was observed during the 1940s and 1950s for the reasons already mentioned, but since the mid-1960s, the percentage of 60% of the total agrarian value has been exceeded once again, until it exceeded 90% during the last decade of the 20th century.

With small ups and downs, except for the decades after the Civil War, the 1940s, and the 1950s, the livestock herd began to experience spectacular growth, especially from the second half of the century and, especially, between the sixties and the turn of the century (471.97% from 1858 to 2000) (Figure 2). The herd of other livestock species has had a somewhat more irregular dynamic. Although, in absolute values, the evolution of other types of livestock was much more modest, measured in percentage terms, the dynamics were generally increasing in the same period.

From 1929 to 2000, meat production, measured in tons, grew by 32.33% and milk production, estimated in liters, by 173.63% (Figure 3). The dynamics of both products had a parallel development that we can qualify as extraordinary. In this dynamic, two different phases can be observed: one of slower productive increase until the mid-1960s (39.54%), and a second phase of accelerated increase from the mid-sixties to the end of the seventies, which culminated at the end of the following decade with the entry of Spain into the European Common Market.

The total balance of the increase in meat production from 1920 to 2000 was 165.16%, particularly beef (229.14% compared to 28.90% of other species) by carcass weight of slaughtered animals. The increase was continuous from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, although it experienced a gradual reduction in the last decade of the 20th century. As is logical, the proportional increase in the value of meat production is verified, especially from the seventies: from 1930 to 2000, the value of current pesetas increased by 57,580.75% for the total and 75,533.86% in the case of bovine meat (Figure 2).

As far as milk production is concerned, the data obtained confirms the main traditional vocation of Cantabrian livestock, at least since the 19th century, but accentuated in the 20th century until it became a predominant production.

From the end of the nineteenth century and, above all, from the beginning of the following century, the introduction of more productive dairy cattle breeds was consolidated. The change of cattle breeds meant the passage of a production of 177,792 thousand liters in 1929 to 488,813 in 2000 (174.94%).

Two distinct phases can be observed in this dynamic: one of slower production growth until the mid-1960s and another of accelerated growth from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, culminating at the end of the following decade, coinciding with the entry of Spain into the European Union.

This dynamic was not alien to the application of some policies of the Common Agricultural Policy, especially the Mountain Agriculture Law of 1982, as a measure to support agricultural exploitations located in Mountain Areas, such as most Cantabrian livestock farms, which supplemented the minuscule remuneration earned from raw milk sold to dairy factories with small subsidies and other contributions from the Agricultural Policy of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This allowed the survival for a long time of a large number of farms of very small productive dimensions, or livestock microfundism in short. Very different was the impact of the application of milk quotas upon access to the European Union, which had little impact on milk production (−0.93% in the first year of quota application, 1994/1995, until 2000).

Most of the milk production was for sale to the industries that had arisen in the region and specialized in the industrial processing and marketing of dairy products in factories established in different places since the early twentieth century, such as that of the multinational Nestlé company. Thus, as early as 1929, 80,300,000 liters, or 45.17% of total production, were reserved for industry, and this had grown to 454,180,000 liters in 2000 (92.91%), which means that the amount of milk produced for sale to dairy industries grew by 465.60% in that period.

The transformations mentioned so far were accompanied by other changes that facilitated them: the progressive mechanization of agricultural work and the use of fertilizers.

Until the sixties of the 20th century, agricultural activity in Cantabria was barely mechanized, as confirmed by the existence of only 946 seed drills in 1951 compared to the 3670 existing in 1972, to give just one reference example, when the mechanization process began to take off (ICANE, agricultural machinery in Cantabria, 1930–1972). Between 1968 and 1999, the number of motorized ploughs in use increased from 1199 to 10,653 (788.49%), the number of tractors from 428 to 5929 (1285.28%), while the average power of each tractor grew. Another significant piece of machinery introduced, considering the primacy of milk production, consisted of milking machines, whose number rose from 5111 in 1980 to 8497 in 1986 (66.25%). At the same time, crops were intensified through the contribution of fertilizers, from 745 tons of mineral fertilizers used in 1950 to 22,176 tons in 1978 (2876.64%).

The boom in agricultural activity translated directly into a significant increase in the price of arable land and meadows in the second half of the 20th century: 794.19% for arable land and 349.20% for meadow since 1950 to 1966, reaching values that hardly changed until the end of the 20th century (13.56% from 1983 to 2000) (ICANE, Average price of farmland and meadows in Cantabria, 1844–1966, and Average price of land in Cantabria, 1983–2000).

3.2. Recent Dynamics

If the second half of the twentieth century was the time of the boom in agricultural activity in Cantabria, the last years of that century and the first decades of the current century witnessed the development of a very different restructuring process and, at the same time, a decline of agrarian activity that can be described as accelerated deagrarianization. Its main manifestations are the decrease of almost all the indicators considered: area of agricultural use, number of farms, livestock herd, people employed in the primary sector, and even livestock productions and the weight of their value in the regional GDP. To analyze this process, use has been made, basically, of the information provided by the last three Agrarian Censuses, prepared in 1999, 2009, and 2020, which provide comparable data on similar aspects, although they are not always identical and coincidental in their structure. These data have been contrasted and complemented with those obtained from other statistical documentary sources at the state and regional levels.

3.2.1. Reduction in the Number of Farms and the Useful Agricultural Area

The comparison of the data from the three Censuses also shows the recent regression of the surface of the lands used for agricultural production in Cantabria. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the total agricultural area has decreased by a third (−32.55%), and the Usable Agricultural Area (UAA) by −17.20%, mainly due to the decrease in land used for permanent pasture (−18.40%) and other uses (−55.30%), generally forestry (Figure 3).

The data provided by Corine Land Cover supports the dynamics as succinctly stated. Thus, between 1990 and 2018, agricultural areas have fallen by 0.70%, with the phases of greatest decline being 2000–2006 (−0.93%) and 2006–2012 (−1.76%), while between 1990 and 2000 they increased by 1.31%. In the same period, the land for forest use has fallen by −1.36%, especially between 1990 and 2000 (−1.22%) and 2012–2018 (−0.47%).

The SIOSE figures, although different because they are also different in criteria, partially support the trend: the land used for family orchards decreased by −81.43% between 2005 and 2014, while the area of agricultural and forestry holdings did so by −10.11% (that used for crops by −1.08% and forestry by −0.05%).

Based on data from the Agricultural Censuses, it can be seen that, between 1999 and 2020, the number of farms has been reduced to less than half (−57.86%), as have, although to a lesser extent, the dimensions of the total agricultural area (−32.55%) (Figure 4).

The decrease has been spectacular in the case of farms with Usable Agricultural Area (UAA), with a regression of −63.17%. But this degrowth varies according to the size of the farms: the number of very small farms, of less than 5 ha, has decreased by −80.50%, the small ones from 5 to 10 ha by −60.89%, and those of 10 to 20 ha by −54.69%. In contrast, the proportion of medium-sized farms at the regional level has increased from 20 to 50 ha (32.46%) and from 50 to 100 ha (320.49%). Those covering more than 100 ha (−16.86%), mostly forestry holdings under collective tenure, also decreased.

3.2.2. The Decrease and Transformation of Livestock Farms and Herds

In line with this dynamic, livestock has also suffered a significant decline in its volume: −33.74% measured in Total Livestock Units (TLU). From 2001 to 2021, there was a large decline in the number of livestock farms (−25.98%) and the number of cattle (−17.98%) but growth in the number of cattle per farm (10.79%). Although the absolute predominance continues to correspond to livestock farms, which still represent more than 80% of the total and, especially, those with bovine cattle (77.84%).

Organic livestock production has never been very important: in 2009, there were only 63 cattle farms (0.91% of the total of 6925 farms with cattle at the time); in 2020, there are 31 farms out of a total of 5955 (0.52%).

Between 1999 and 2020, farms of this type suffered an extraordinary reduction in their number, especially those with bovine cattle (−51.11%), the loss being much greater in the case of farms with cattle oriented to milk production (−69.89%), while the number of those dedicated to meat-oriented cattle increased somewhat (1.06%).

The values are similar if the variable observed is the number of heads of cattle. This regression has been widespread and has affected all livestock species but, due to its economic weight, acquires special importance in the case of beef cattle.

The data provided by ICANE (Census of the main cattle breeds) show a decrease of −25.73% in the total number of cattle between 1995 and 2021, with differences in terms of time: a slight increase can be perceived in the last years of the 20th century, and there was a notable reduction in the first five years of the 21st century until the total volume of the herd became stabilized from 2005 to 2006 at around 250,000 cattle units. On the other hand, not all types of beef cattle have been affected equally, and it is cows (females over 24 months of age), which are the fundamental pillar of the herd, that have experienced the greatest losses (−17.72%).

The dynamics have not been the same for all breeds: the greatest regression has occurred in the dairy-oriented herd, Friesian/Holstein cattle: (−57.53% in the case of cows and −60.75 in the total). In contrast, the herd oriented towards meat production has experienced a notable increase: the number of cattle with this productive orientation increased by 357.06%, and, more specifically, the number of adult cows grew by 480.98%. To a lesser extent, there was also a growth in the mixed-cattle herd, especially cows (30.38%) and cattle of native breeds (85.09% in the case of the Tudanca breed).

The recent evolution of the cattle herd shows a revealing structural change: dairy cattle represented 69.65% of the cattle herd in 1995, but in 2021, only 36.81%. If we take into account only females over 24 months, the percentages are very similar: 72.10% of milk-producing cows in 1995 and 36.99% in 2021 (Figure 5).

According to Agrarian Censuses from 1999 to 2020, the number of Total Livestock Units (TLU) fell from 311,072 to 205,994 (−33.78%), although their value in pesetas (Total Gross Margin) grew by 130.16%. Measured in number of cattle units, the herd lost −21.90%, with a large difference between the decline of dairy cows (−51.69%) and cows intended for meat production (+21.35%). There has also been a decrease in the number of smaller cattle intended for replacement.

This dynamic has been very conditioned by the impact of the economic crisis, the Great Recession, which left a very depleted herd from 2010 to 2015, although there has been a subsequent recovery and stabilization.

According to the Livestock Surveys prepared by the Ministry of Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs from 2002 to 2022, the number of units of the cattle herd decreased by 20.81%, but with significant differences in terms of the type of livestock: −55.10% in the case of cattle aged between 12 and 24 months and used for replacement and −51.13% for milking cows, while non-milking cows increased by 33.04%. The ultimate result was a shift in production orientation: milking cows took up 62.57% of cows in 2002 and only 38.04% in 2022. This shows the progressive replacement of intensive milk production by extensive meat production.

As for the current composition of the cattle herd, the predominance continues to correspond to females over 2 years old, but the percentage of farms with dairy cows is lower (36.54%) compared to those that keep other types of cows, especially meat-oriented ones. Correspondingly, the TLU of dairy cows is only 44.06% of the total number of cows. Smaller cattle for replacement have also lost weight: 13.04% of cattle aged between 2 and 4 years, mostly steers for slaughter; 12.87% of cattle between 1 and 2 years of age; and 12.60% of cattle less than one year of age.

Consequently, the fundamental transformation has consisted, above all, in a productive reorientation: if in 1999 the farms oriented towards dairy production were dominant (54.01%), 20 years later the proportions have been reversed since only 33.27% of the farms with cattle are dairy-oriented compared to 77.01% of those oriented towards meat.

Another revealing change has been related to the modification of the structure of farms according to livestock and economic size, despite which tiny farms with less than 10 TLU (38.39%) and small ones with between 10 and 50 TLU (43.19%) are still of great importance, while the large ones with more than 100 TLU only represent 6.68%, although they have 39.49% of the cattle and 40.35% of the TLU (Figure 6). In the light of such data, it could be inferred that the livestock holdings with a minimum of viability correspond only to those with more than 50 cattle units, or just over 1000 (18.42%). The changes outlined, especially the latter, have resulted in an upward variation of the economic size of livestock farms measured through Total Standard Production (TSP) (Figure 7;

Table 1. Structure of livestock farms in Cantabria according to production size in 2020. Source: elaboration by the author based on data from the INE (Agrarian Census 2020).

Total Standard Production (TSP)	Number of Farms	Useful Agricultural Surface (UAA ha)	Total Livestock Units (LU)	Total Standard Production (Thousand €)
Less than 2000 €	13.91	11.73	0.26	0.32
From 2000 € to 3999 €	13.18	6.43	1.36	1.08
From 4000 € to 7999 €	13.91	8.68	3.72	2.71
From 8000 € to 14,999 €	13.18	11.39	6.97	4.75
From 15,000 € to 24,999 €	16.85	10.93	8.23	5.71
From 25,000 € to 49,999 €	15.70	15.73	14.46	10.92
From 50,000 € to 99,999 €	10.78	13.98	16.33	16.75
From 100,000 € to 499,999 €	11.27	18.72	37.43	45.67
More than 500,000 €	8.71	2.42	11.23	12.09
Total	9.02	100.00	100.00	100.00

).

Even so, still in 2020, it highlights the great importance that small farms continue to have: 70.42% of farms have a TSP below EUR 25,000 per year, although they have almost half of the UAA (49.16%) but only 20.55% of the TLU and 14.58% of the TSP. In the meantime, medium and large farms only take up 9.61% of the total; they own just over a fifth of the UAA (21.14%), almost half of the TLU (48.67%), and 57.76% of the TSP. These data highlight the survival of a true productive duality that tends to concentrate in the hands of larger farms.

3.2.3. Stagnation and Regression of Agricultural Production

According to information provided by the Agricultural Statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAPA), Cantabria’s milk production is down from 557.3 thousand tons in 2003 to 464.8 in 2021 (−16.60%), meaning that Cantabrian milk production represented 8% on the first date of the total Spanish production and only 6.10% on the second date. The beginning of productive decline has taken place since the second five years of the century and has been temporarily accentuated with the Great Recession, although it experienced a measure of subsequent recovery without reaching the previous values of the beginning of the twenty-first century (Figure 8).

In the last five years of the 1990s, the quota system and the production rights established by the European Union to produce milk for sale to industry began to be applied. The restructuring process, which started before and is still unfinished, accelerated from the moment after Spain’s integration into the EU. The fundamental reason was not the obstacles to producing and selling more raw milk to the processing industries, but the fact that small farms had the opportunity to monetize those rights, the sale of which provided them with an income that they did not previously have, much higher than the profitability that the miniscule dairy production provided them. On many occasions, this remuneration constituted a notable complement to retirement pensions for older farmers without the possibility of transferring the farm to younger family members. In most cases, those who acquired these production rights were other farms in the region itself, which thus increased their productive capacity and economic viability. It is for this reason that the regional quota as a whole not only did not decrease, despite the disappearance of a large number of dairy farms, but also remained at the initial volume and even grew somewhat as a result of the acquisition of productive rights, or quotas, by farms in other regions.

The milk quota system was implemented in 1994/1995 and appears to have had two successive phases: one corresponding to the reduction of the number of tiny dairy farms or, at least, the cessation of their production for sale to the industry during the period of validity of the quota system, and another linked to the increase in medium- and large-sized family farms following the abolition of the quota system (Figure 9).

According to the production quota allocated to Cantabria in 1995/1996 there were 479,509 thousand kg of milk obtained in 7748 farms, which represents an average size per farm of 61,888 kg. Twenty years later, in 2014/2015, when the quota system ended, there were only 1798 dairy farms (−76.79%) that obtained a slightly lower production of 448.455 kg miles (−6.48%). Nevertheless, it is necessary to note the total productive increase that took place in the first five years of the twenty-first century, during which more than 500,000 kg of milk were produced per year. The difference between the percentage decrease in the number of producing farms and in total production manifests itself in the extraordinary increase in the average size of farms, from 61,888 kg in 1995 to 249,418 kg in 2015 (402,916%).

Since the quotas were abolished in 2015, the volume of milk delivered to the industry has decreased slightly (−1.32%), while the number of producing farms has decreased far more (−30.45% in just seven years). It can be concluded that the cessation of the quota system has not changed the trend towards a decrease in the number of producing farms, which is considerably lower but producing almost the same.

In short, for one reason or another, so far this century, the number of dairy farmers supplying the dairy industries has diminished from 3811 in 2001 to 967 in 2022 (−74.62%), while milk production has fallen by −16.23% (from 487,244 thousand liters in the first date to 408,130 in the second). The reduction in the number of farms, to a greater extent than the volume of production, has resulted in an increase in the average production of each of them: from 127,852 kg on the first date to 422,057 kg on the second date (230.11%).

Part of the decrease in the number of farms has also been due to the implementation of a subsidized abandonment program that benefitted 1620 farms between 1996 and 2008, few and small ones at first (with productions of less than 50,000 kg of milk per year) and much larger in recent years (between 100,000 and 140,000 kg of annual milk production): the productive size of farms that ceased milk production increased by 343.10%. In total, 135,733,144 kg of milk were available, purchased almost entirely by resilient farms that, in this way, increased their production quota.

So far, the restructuring has consisted of a substantial decrease in the proportion of farms with a production of less than 500,000 kg of milk per year, in reverse order of their size. At the same time, the rate of large dairy farms has increased, in particular those that obtain more than 2 million kg per year (Figure 10).

But this evolution did not affect the entire territory of Cantabria in the same way. Analysis at the municipal level shows that most of the farms that have lost the milk quota are located in the municipalities of the western half of the Autonomous Community, in some of which all the milk farms with quota rights have disappeared. In contrast, in the eastern half, the disappearance of dairy farms has been smaller. Many municipalities have increased the volume of their total quota, and many of the resistant farms have increased their size and, consequently, their productive capacity.

One of the most significant aspects is the division of the Cantabrian territory into both specializations, with two well-defined livestock areas. The counties of the western sector clearly show a dedication to the production of meat, while milk production is concentrated in the coastal area and in the central-eastern territory (Figure 11).

The live cattle trade also carries much weight in the livestock production of Cantabria. From 1995 to 2018, the number of live cattle units sold was reduced by almost half (−49.49%) but with significant differences: until 2010, there was an extraordinary decrease in sales of cattle for supply and studs as well as a significant loss in the sale of cows (−55.92%) and in rearing (−21.43%), which highlights the virtual disappearance of one of the most important livestock activities until then, the sale of replacement cattle, especially that for dairy purposes.

Other data from 2008 to 2018 confirm the above: between both dates, the number of cattle sold was reduced by −59.83%, which seems to express the strong impact of the Great Recession without a subsequent recovery. The regression mainly affects calves (−68.55%), meat steers (−78.32%), and milk steers (−31.81%). In contrast, sales of larger cattle increased, including dairy cows (72.50%) and meat cows (1.468.53%), which perhaps could be interpreted as a symptom of the acceleration of the cessation of activity in both orientations (ICANE. Detail of sales of cattle according to place of destination and type of livestock until 2018).

With small variations, all data confirm the recent regression in the number of live cattle units sold (−34.14% from 1995 to 2017). There are hardly any discrepancies in relation to the sex of the cattle sold, but there are great differences according to productive orientation, with a progressive increase in sales of meat-oriented animals while those of dairy-oriented cattle decrease. This fact is also supported by the ages of the cattle sold—calves and steers rather than adult animals—which can be interpreted as an increase in the importance of meat production and a loss of importance for the rearing market.

3.2.4. The Impact of Input Costs and Prices Paid for Livestock Products

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in particular since the start of the Great Recession, which began in 2008, there has been a notable increase in the price of fertilizers. Proof of this is the increase in the price of some of the most widely used chemical fertilizers: 88.71% for ammonium nitrate and 75.44% for lime sulfate between 1997 and 2012. Something similar has happened with the prices of feed used to supplement cattle’s diets, especially bovines. Thus, between 2008 and 2012 alone, some types of animal feed used to nourish dairy and meat cattle increased by around or above 20%4.

In contrast, basic agricultural product prices have followed a very different dynamic from that of input costs. There has been a significant increase in the price of raw milk paid to producers until the late eighties of the twentieth century, from 5.9 pesetas in 1965 to 45.5 in 1989 (671.19%). This increase was stopped as soon as Spain joined the European Union, which had large surpluses of milk production, and because of the greater ease of importing this product from other European countries, resulting in the subsequent decrease in the price, which took several years to recover.

In the thirty-eight years from 1985 to 2021, the weighted average price paid to producers for a liter of raw milk rose from EUR 0.19 to EUR 0.34 (74.36%), although it frequently remained below the value of production costs. Especially significant was the impact of the Great Recession, which led to the immediate reduction in prices that bottomed out in 2009 and 2015. It does not seem unwise to relate this dynamic to the intensification of the crisis and the above-mentioned decline of the agricultural sector during these years. As of 2022, there has been a price readjustment that has fostered an increase in the price to EUR 0.43/liter in 2022 and EUR 0.60/liter in 2023 (76.76% compared to 2021)5.

The evolution of the price of cattle experienced a significant increase in the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the eighties. So, since 1966, the price of beef cattle has increased by 335.21% per kg of live steers and 186.89% per kg of cows. The increase in the price of dairy cattle was greater: that of female and male calves was 1046.63% and 1322.53% per kg, respectively; that of second- to fourth-calving cows and of fifth-calving cows upwards was, respectively, 529.66% and 598.24% per kg. This dynamic was completely interrupted in the last decade of the previous century, becoming a situation of practical stagnation since then.

The uneven evolution of input prices paid by farmers and the prices of products received by them has had the consequence that, on many occasions, the production costs have been above the remuneration of the product. This has undoubtedly caused the loss of viability and the acceleration of the cessation of the activity of small and medium-sized farms, unable to survive in a prolonged situation of continuous losses, as happened during the years of the Great Recession.

3.2.5. Decrease of Agricultural Labor and Employment

At the same time, there has been an evolution in the number of people working in agricultural activities, forestry, and fisheries that are affiliated with social security: from 6532 affiliated people in 2009, it has gone to 4744 in 2022 (−27.37%). While in the former year they were 3.07% of the regional total of affiliated persons, in 2022 the percentage has been reduced to 2.17% of the total, which represents the loss of almost one percentage point in 14 years from what was already a very low value. This regressive dynamic contrasts with the general increase in workers (+2.72%) between both dates, which is especially linked to the increase in the number of people employed in the services sector (+14.05%) as unquestionable proof of the accelerated and very advanced employment tertiarization process (Figure 12).

The Agrarian Censuses measure the work done in agricultural activity through Total Annual Work Units (AWU). This indicator also shows an extraordinary decline in activity within the sector; thus, it went from 16,895 AWU registered in 1999 to 6906 AWU in 2020 (−59.12%). The data reflect not only the regression of the agricultural labor force but also other significant changes: a small increase in wage labor (5.06%), probably because of the increase in larger farms that require more labor than the strictly family model, at the same time as a spectacular decrease in the work provided by family labor: both that of the holder (−59.22%) and, especially, that of the holder’s spouse (−84.24%) and other family members (−78.96%). If we relate these data to the number of farms, it follows that most of them consume nothing more than around 1 AWU (

Table 2. Evolution in different types of workers in agricultural activity in Cantabria. Source: elaboration by the author based on data from the INE (Agrarian Censuses).

Annual Work Units (AWU)	1999	2009	2020	∆ 1999–2020 (%)
Total	16.895	9.521	6.906	−59.12
Employees	1.803	1.642	1.894	5.06
Fixed	1.609	1.590	1.527	−5.09
Eventuals	194	52	193	−0.48
Family Labor	15.093	7.879	913	−93.95
Holders of the farm	10.052	5.942	4.100	−59.22
Spouses of the holder	2.792		440	−84.24
Other family members	2.248	1.937	473	−78.96

).

Among these changes, there is also a slight improvement in the vocational training of farm managers: in 1999, 94.46% percent of them had training based only on practical experience; in 2020, the percentage, although still very high, dropped to 71.15%. In contrast, the proportion of farm managers with agricultural university education has grown somewhat (from 0.36% to 0.93%), as has, to a much higher degree, the percentage of those with some type of agricultural training (3.80% in 1999 and 26.00% in 2020) (

Table 3. Dynamics of the collective of owners/managers of farms in Cantabria in the first decades of the XXI century. Source: elaboration by the author based on data from the INE (Agrarian Censuses).

	1999				2009				2020
Farm Owners	People	%	Men	Women	People	%	Men	Women	People	%	Men	Women
<34 years old	1.483	9.0	1.038	445	635	7.4	420	215	596	9.6	478	118
>35 <54 years old	6.746	40.8	4.329	2.417	3.887	45.0	2.421	1.466	2.546	41.2	1.760	786
>55 <64 years old	3.980	24.1	2.329	1.651	2.360	27.3	1.419	941	1.823	29.5	1.128	695
>65 years old	4.332	26.2	2.795	1.537	1.749	20.3	1.032	717	1.222	19.8	754	468
Total people	16.541	100.0	10.491	6.050	8.631	100.0	5.292	3.339	6.187	100.0	4.120	2.067
%			63.4	36.6			61.3	38.7			66.6	33.4

).

As regards the distribution of farm managers by age and sex, two points should be emphasized. First, it is an agricultural asset group that has aged a lot. Taking farm managers as a reference, one can observe that the fundamental group corresponds to people between 35 and 54, with an important representation of those between 55 and 64. Likewise, mention should be made of the important presence of farm managers over 65, although there was a small decrease in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, while the increase of those under 34 was very slight (less than one percentage point in the same period), without reaching 10% in 2020, which clearly shows the scarce possibilities of continuity and generational renewal of agricultural activity.

Secondly, the predominance in agricultural activity continues to be basically male: in 1999, the percentage of women in charge of an agricultural farm was 36.58% of the total; in 2009, it had risen to 38.69% and was reduced to just over a third in 2020 (33. 41%). These data show the scarce or non-existent incorporation of women into the activity, and it is also highly significant that in 2020 the lowest percentage of women managers of exploitation corresponds to the youngest, under 34 years old (19.80% of all people in that age group).

Agricultural employment reaches very low proportions in general: only a few mountain municipalities have in the primary sector more than 20% of people affiliated with social security, while most of the rural municipalities proper only maintain between 10% and 20% (Figure 13). As expected, the lowest values correspond to the municipalities integrated in the functional urban areas of Santander and Bilbao and their contiguous territories, with less than 5% of the active agricultural population, including significant cases such as Reinosa and Campoo de Enmedio, its peri-urban area, and the rururban areas of the Marina Oriental in the surroundings of the small cities of Laredo and Santoña. It is clear that the weight of the agricultural labor force is inversely proportional to the levels of urbanization, as expected, but it can also be observed that the decrease in agricultural employment has affected all rural areas, including remote mountainous ones.

In relation to the above, a warning should be made of a fact that is beginning to occur in Cantabria and that somehow intervenes in the process of deagrarianization: the residential migration of agricultural assets to municipalities with small population centers, which are, however, integrated in a Functional Urban Area (FUA) and well communicated, and to county capitals where they have easy accessibility to a greater number of services and equipment. This process involves the daily movement from peri-urban and semi-urban population entities to farms located in other municipalities of a fully rural and less well-equipped character, which contributes to the development of reverse pendulum movements and increased self-mobility. Like this, it is telling that the municipalities in which the percentage of active agricultural residents has increased the most between 2012 and 2021 are not precisely, with exceptions, the most rural ones but a few peri-urban towns (Cartes, San Felices de Buelna, Polanco, Suances, Ampuero, Limpias), county seats (Cabezón de la Sal, Los Corrales de Buelna, Ramales de la Victoria), and even urban nuclei (Castro Urdiales). In contrast, the most rural municipalities are those in which there has been a notable decrease in agricultural workers, both residents and non-residents, according to the location of the farm. The latter aspect is, to a greater extent, an obvious symptom of the total abandonment of the activity and, at the same time, of the cessation of residence in rural areas.

3.2.6. The Loss of Importance of GDP Contributed by the Primary Sector to Regional GDP

The dynamics of the factors of production, employment, production costs, and prices exposed so far have a synthetic and unquestionable manifestation in the evolution of the contribution of the primary sector to regional GDP. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the regional GDP, in raw data, has increased from EUR 7,968,169 in 2000 to 15,069,729 in 2022 (+89.12%), while the GDP of the primary sector has gone from EUR 341,861 to EUR 142,831 in the same period (−56.28%). This implies that the economic weight of this sector has gone from representing 4.29% at the regional level in 2000 to 0.95% in 2022.

The marginal contribution of the primary sector to GDP clearly shows the deagrarianization of the regional economy and the transformation of the structure of the economic base of rural areas, which is not being counteracted by the development of the agri-food industry (Figure 14). This activity is not a sector that shows an expansive dynamic, as in 2019, there were 15 establishments less than ten years earlier (−2.65%). On the latter date, there were only 551 industrial establishments engaged in the food industry in Cantabria, representing 21.52% of the manufacturing establishments in the region. It must be considered, nevertheless, that not all of them use agricultural products obtained in Cantabria as raw materials. As far as location is concerned, more than 202 manufacturing establishments (36.66%) are located in urban areas (Santander, Torrelavega, Santoña, and Laredo) and in other peri-urban and semi-urban areas (23.59%). This is quite probably because many of them, especially those located in port areas, in particular Laredo and Santoña, are engaged in the production of canned fish, although we cannot go into any further precision since they have not been broken down in the available statistics.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

As can be deduced from the way in which the deagrarianization process is taking place in the case of Cantabria, it is a generalized dynamic that affects both the dynamic rural areas affected by urbanization and those others that are in a situation of resilience and/or decline. But the forms of evolution and their socioeconomic and territorial effects are very different.

The widespread nature of deagrarianization and its differential effects seem to be closely linked to the globalization and financialization phenomena of the world economy that affect all territories, even those apparently less integrated into territorial economic networks. In short, it is a process that responds more to the new productive and territorial logics of the globalized economy than to specific territorial conditions and circumstances, although these also have an influence [77,78]. As a result, local responses face greater difficulties in being effective and in achieving success in their development objectives.

On the other hand, it can be inferred that this process is also linked to important changes in productive systems and in production itself. This is evident in the case of Cantabria, a region that has specialized in milk production for more than a century but is ceasing to do so, although the quantity of milk produced has remained at similar values. The mutation cannot be solely attributed, as has sometimes been done, to the application of the productive restriction imposed by the quota policy of the Common Agrarian Policy, since production did not increase when the quotas ceased to be applied. Undoubtedly, other factors (input prices, producer prices, reduction of the agricultural workforce, etc.) of supraregional and even supranational economic dynamics have had a greater impact.

The results obtained from the In-depth analysis of the case of Cantabria also show that deagrarianization can be accompanied by the transformation of the productive structures themselves and, in particular, by the survival of a true productive duality, but with a clear trend towards concentration in the hands of larger farms, which are, however, unable to overcome the challenges and conditions imposed by large agro-industrial companies.

The deagrarianization process manifests itself in many different ways. Although stereotypically it is almost solely identified with the decline of traditional agricultural activities, it can paradoxically coincide with the modernization and technification of these activities and even with the maintenance of the increase in yields and production. There are unequivocal indicators in the decrease in the volume of small and medium-sized farms, the decrease in areas for agricultural use and for livestock, and, finally, the transformation of social structures following the reduction in the volume of population that works in and lives from agricultural activity, its weight in the social group, and its influence on the decisions related to territorial organization and management. However, while it is true that there is a certain coincidence of deagrarianization with the processes that have become known as social “depeasantization”, there is no full identification with those of territorial “deruralization” but rather with the birth of new forms of rurality [79,80].

In the most dynamic rural areas with greater potential in resources and economic activities, the consequences are milder, and there has even been a strengthening on the part of some modern and profitable farms and the establishment of their own agricultural active population and that of other nearby rural areas, together with the invigoration and diversification of their economic base due to the development of new productive functions [81].

On the other hand, in rural areas that are barely resilient and, to a greater extent, in those that were already in decline, deagrarianization weakens their economic base, which has become limited to a regressive and even marginal agricultural activity, to a simplification of the social structure characterized by the presence of some generally old agricultural assets, and to a large number of people whose income comes from unemployment and disability benefits and retirement pensions. Likewise, in these areas, deagrarianization shows in the acceleration of the depopulation process due to the intensification of the residential migration of the agricultural assets themselves towards spaces with a greater offer and variety of essential equipment and services. In these cases, a certain apparent economic diversification can be seen since most of the people registered as active in other sectors are employed in companies and establishments located in different, more dynamic municipalities, to which they travel daily to carry out their work, as is demonstrated by the extraordinary increase in daily mobility in the rural areas of Cantabria.

In sum, the deagrarianization-tertiarization duality is perceptible in all rural areas of Cantabria, but in some it corresponds to an economic reality: the decrease in agricultural activity and the simultaneous increase in the activities of the service sector. In other cases, it is a statistical effect: the decrease in agricultural activities is manifested in the increase in the proportion of tertiary activities although the number of people employed in the services sector has not really increased. In this sense, the dual effects of tourism tertiarization in such rural spaces are also clearly perceived, since the absolute primacy of rural tourism generates an extreme dependence on agents not controlled by the territory itself.

In relation to the above, contrary to the opinions that some time ago identified the loss of importance of agricultural activity with the promotion of rural development and economic growth, deagrarianization processes are now increasingly becoming a subject of social and territorial concern in the academic world from different scientific disciplines (sociology, geography, economics, etc.). Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted from the perspective of previous studies and the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest possible context. Future research directions may also be highlighted.