These and other minor abuses will not be remedied till landowner and farmer live on their properties—a thing unknown in Spain. The farmer, or labrador—as with grotesque incongruity he styles himself—lives in his cool and luxurious mansion in the town, receiving visits every few days from his steward; but months go by, even years, between his rare visits to the farm. The land is, as a rule, his own, and being a man of means, so long as things go on fairly, and his sacks of corn or casks of wine arrive in town in due season, and without excessive pillage, he is content.
Most of the farms being held by capitalists, the farmer can withstand the loss of a few bad years: and when a good one comes—they calculate one fat year to four lean—all losses are recouped and a large balance to the good rewards his patience.
Ploughing, or what passes muster as such—a tickling of the surface by tiny wooden ploughshare identical with those of Roman days, drawn by yokes of tardy-plodding oxen—takes place in autumn. Wheat is sown in December, the seed scattered broadcast, and one-third of the land laid fallow each year. The fallows (manchones) in spring produce wildernesses of weeds, as tall and rank as the corn itself, and gorgeous with wild-flowers—Elysian fields for the bustards, which revel amidst the ripening seeds and legions of locusts and grasshoppers. Here whole acres glow with crimson trefoil, contrasting with the blue borage and millions of convolvuli: there are lilies and balsams, asphodel, iris, and narcissi of every hue—but it is idle to attempt to describe the unspeakable floral beauties of the Spanish manchon.
The fallows are not, however, left to waste their substance entirely on weeds and wild-flowers, for they form the best spring-grazing grounds for cattle, and thus, too, receive a certain allowance of manure.
One's patience is exercised to watch the tardy oxen creeping along those league-long furrows! Even in our English corn-lands, in the fifty-acre fields of Norfolk or Northumberland, there appears to our non-technical eyes a grievous disproportion between the work to be done and the means employed, albeit a dozen stout draughts may be at work in a single field. Here, where the "field" stretches away unbroken by fence or hedge to the horizon, a day's journey in either direction for those plodding oxen, the task truly appears more hopeless than the labours of Sisyphus. Not even on the prairies of Western America can they boast a longer furrow than can be traced on these plains of tawny, treeless Spain. Well may the ploughman seek, by chanting old-time ditties, to avoid utter vacuity of mind.
In June and July the harvest is gathered in—no musical rattle of reaper, for the sickle still holds its place: and over the breadth of fallen swathe soar hawks of every sort and size, preying on the locusts and other large insects and reptiles now deprived of their accustomed covert.
Then follows the threshing of the corn, an operation which is carried on with the primitive simplicity of the patriarchs of old—perhaps on precisely the same lines. The sheaves are brought from the stubble on creaking bullock-carts, and thrown on the era, or threshing-ground, a hardened level space adjoining the farm. Here it is threshed—or rather, trodden out under foot by the yeguas—brood-mares, a team of which are kept briskly trotting over the circle of outstrewn sheaves, driven on by a man who stands in the centre. With a long whip and the skill of a circus manager, he drives the mares in circles, round and round—this is the only duty asked of the yeguas all the year, except that of maternity. Amidst clouds of dust and heat the sweating animals are urged on till the corn and brittle straw is trodden into finest chaff. Then the mares are rested, the grain and chaff pushed aside to make room for fresh sheaves, and the operation is repeated till all the produce has been trodden out.
The next process is to throw the broken corn high in air with broad wooden shovels. The wind serves to separate the grain from the chaff, the former falling in heaps on the earth, while the lighter material drifts away to leeward. The grain is gathered into sacks, loaded upon donkeys, and away goes the team to the owner's granary in the town: as many as three score, and more, of patient borricos may often at this season be seen plodding along the dusty byeway. Similarly one sees, at the same season, the casks of newly-pressed wine being jolted along on bullock-carts towards the town, along rough roads or tracks that will not be required again till the same traffic occurs after the next year's vintage.