José Manuel Rus: «It's necessary to favor the coexistence between the rural and the cities»

To take care of the countryside is also to fill it with future and people with vital projects. The recipe of José Manuel Rus is of an overwhelming common sense and of a deep knowledge as well. After all, since 1998 he has been the manager of Moexmu (Mostra Exposición de Muimenta), one of the most important events (if not the most important) for the Galician livestock sector.

A fact. Moexmu received last year the Aresa Rural Development Award and the Agader do Sector Agrogandeiro Award. «It is already rare to receive two such prestigious awards at the same time», he proudly acknowledges.

Rus studied Business Administration and Business Management at the Lugo Campus in the mid-1990s and later took a postgraduate course in Management and Commercial Management of Cooperatives and SMEs also at USC. This university education, together with his deep knowledge of the livestock sector (at home, they had a small livestock farm), gives him a global vision of the situation of the industry and its present and future challenges.

We talked about all this in this talk...

-The 41st edition of Moexmu (Mostra Exposición de Muimenta) will be held next April. What does this milestone mean to you?

-In the event of these characteristics, in which the organization falls on the neighbors, who in this case are businessmen and businesswomen, although the institutions also participate, it has merit to reach these 41 editions.

When we were awarded the Aresa Prize in March, many people who were not on the organizing committees experienced it as a success. Something similar happened when the tribute was made for the 40th anniversary of Moexmu when a lot of people from Muimenta and nearby towns came.

The same happens at the Pozomouro festival, which is organized by some guys from here. People from Muimenta come even though the music is not what they would prefer. They do it to support the children and young people of the village.

-So... Is the secret of the Moexmu, the Festa da Filloa or the Pozomouro Fest in the neighborhood of Muimenta?

-Yes, I'm sure it is. Each village organizes itself in its own way, but all the people collaborate, although the organization falls on some specific people.

-41 years of Moexmu deserves a round of applause, but the 39th edition of the Gando Frisón Contest, the Rubia Galega Exhibition and the Poxa de Gando Selecto will also be held within the framework of the exhibition. What is, in your opinion, the relevance of these contests for the Galician livestock sector?

-I am not impartial on the subject, but the cattle breeders' valuation is good, and we could not have reached this point if it were not so. We never interrupt the celebration of Moexmu, neither the contest, the exhibition or the auction, and the cattleman knows that year after year we were there.

The cattle that come to Moexmu are important. To cite an example, in seven of the last eight editions, the Rei de Miñotelo cattle won at Moexmu, but in the competitions in which they participated in Spain, they also won. In the competitions in Europe, they were in the first position.

The quality of the Terra Chá herds is very high, but herds from the rest of the province also come here, as well as from Pontevedra and A Coruña, which are very well known.

-The affection with which they do this work seems to be another of the secrets of the show.

-The breeders say that we treat them very well. Every year we meet with them, and we have the bad habit of listening to them. We from the organization see things that maybe they are not convinced by, but when we explain them, they understand, and the other way around as well. We have improved with their contributions.

That trial-and-error philosophy has been key to consolidating the path that has brought us this far.

-You studied Business Administration and Business Management at the Lugo Campus in the mid-90s and, at the end, you did a postgraduate course on Management and Commercial Direction of Cooperatives and SMEs. How do you remember that period?

-Personally, it is one of the best stages I lived through. I remember a phrase from my law professor, José Benito, who told us a great truth when we were just starting our studies: «It's not the same to go through university as for the university to go through you».

My best friendships come from there. I got to know people from different places, social classes, ideologies... It was an unforgettable period.

Academically, I learned many things that I later put into practice. In my case, it wasn't the typical career that you just completed and forgot, but I studied and learned many things that I later put into practice in the jobs I had in my professional career.

-Galicia, in general, and Lugo, in particular, is a livestock power. What sense does it make to you that a degree like ADE offers specific training related to the sector?

-Of course, it does. In Galicia, ADE is present in several campuses and the livestock power of the province of Lugo, especially Terra Chá, A Mariña and Chantada, requires people in the farms, who are with their parents or in a SAT, and can have specific training on management, regulation... Getting all that particular knowledge is very valuable.

The livestock farming of the 50s has nothing to do with the livestock farming of the 90s, and that of the 90s with that of today even less. Farms have become more and more professional in recent years.

Today, the farmer or the SAT has to be very aware of legal issues, of bureaucratic procedures... For example, doing a cost study for 3 or 5 years is something valuable that many farms entrust to consultants who may not be familiar with the particularities of their activity. That is why the Campus Terra can and should play a very relevant role in providing such critical knowledge for the primary sector, not only for farmers.

-A few days ago, I was reading an interview with a Spanish businessman who has a highly diversified group with more than 50,000 employees, in which he said that for some time now, he has been investing heavily in everything related to the primary sector. It makes sense; right now, all the investor hype seems to be around AI and technology, but what we won't be able to do is give up on feeding ourselves. What do you think of this thought?

-The thought can come from the pandemic perfectly well. Some people still haven't realized that in the pandemic the sector that worked perfectly well was the primary sector: livestock, food... Many of these sectors that people look at, I don't say with contempt, but perhaps with a certain distance, demonstrated their importance for society as a whole.

What this businessman says does not even go far enough. We say that we have to promote the rural areas and support them. We want people to live in rural areas, but I am going to give an example again: to do this interview, we had to wait 10 minutes because the internet connections doesn’t reach the rural areas properly.

If you take health or educational services away from the rural areas, you force people to escape to the cities. If you add to that the fact that there are no jobs either unless it is in the livestock sector or in small personal businesses that die when the owner retires because there is no replacement, then you have a complete and vicious circle to explain what is happening.

We have to promote rural areas. By the way, here we have the inverse problem of housing with respect to the cities. We have empty houses that are falling because there is no one to live in them.

The councellor of Rural Environment said in the delivery of the Agader Prizes that «to live in the rural and of the rural one is possible». I would add «living in the rural areas».

-What you is proposing is a broader action plan.

-For many years we were sold the idea of escaping from the cows, fleeing from the countryside. I was one of them. Today we are seeing many villages in rural areas where schools are being closed, where there are problems with doctors.... It is necessary to favor the coexistence between the rural and the cities, to defend and to stimulate that the people can live in the town and work where they live or even in the city if they want to. This also requires communication routes, which sometimes leave much to be desired.

Yes, indeed, the plan is more global because some things are connected to others.

-Going back to Moexmu, on April 4, 5, and 6, the show will be held with 22 sections in competition. What are the participation and business figures you foresee for this year?

-In 2024, on Saturday and Sunday, we received an average of 10,000 people each day. As for exhibitors, last year there were 125 and 25 stud farms between competition, exhibition and auction. We understand that in this year's edition the figures will be around there as well.

As far as business is concerned, I insist on the need to differentiate enterprises, too. For example, handicraft businesses have to take advantage of those days to sell, while machinery businesses come more to exhibit and operations are closed later. There are tractor dealers who come to the show and do not sell that week, but they do sell two or three weeks later.

For the cattle farms that come to compete, winning a prize means an improvement in their score, which then translates into business. I suggest that the ways of generating business from the show are very diverse.

As far as the Moexmu budget is concerned, the 2024 edition had a cost of 148,558 euros.

-And the last one, from your experience in the sector, what are the challenges of the livestock sector for the coming years? Genetic improvement, use of technology, regulation? Where are the challenges?

-One of them, I don't know if the most important is labor. They don't have it, and the little there are usually immigrants who often do the work we don't want to do. I say this because sometimes debates arise, and I do not know if they make much sense.

In the case of regulation, first of all, it must be said that if it is there, it is for a reason, but it is also true that farmers are often more concerned with bureaucratic procedures than with their activity, so work to simplify them would certainly not be a bad thing.

With the new technologies, perhaps the most important thing is to allow them to do all these procedures in a more agile way because, in rural areas, many areas do not even have access to the Internet.