Gonzalo Úrculo, co-founder of Crowdfarming, is a Spanish entrepreneur who came back from studying in Berlin to find his grandfather’s orange farm near Valencia on the verge of being sold, spent two years barely covering the costs, accidentally killed half the trees switching to organic, and then somehow built, over seventeen years and without any hockey-stick moment, one of the most quietly radical food businesses in Europe. Today Crowdfarming connects 500,000 customers directly with more than 350 farmers across the continent, employs 400 people across two companies, has helped the original farm survive and expand to six properties, and has not run a single discount or promotional offer since it launched.

The mechanic behind it is simple and almost offensively obvious once you hear it: fruit is only picked when it is ordered. No intermediary, no warehouse, no price negotiation after harvest. A Valencia orange reaches a kitchen in Germany in three to four days, compared to a minimum of seventeen if it goes through a conventional supply chain, including the organic one. The freshness is not a marketing claim; it is the structural consequence of removing every step between the tree and the person who ordered from it. And the adoption model — where a customer names a specific tree, receives updates on its progress including the bad news, and pre-pays for their harvest at the start of the season — gives a farmer something no subsidy has ever delivered: predictable income before a single piece of fruit is picked.

In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded in the original citrus field near Valencia where Gonzalo started, the trees around him all carrying small name tags of their adopted owners across Europe, we get into how a German article changed everything from 20 to 240 orders in a single day in 2012, why the first customers who travelled to visit their trees accidentally designed the adoption model, how Crowdfarming launched with eight farmers in 2017 (all still on the platform today), why Gonzalo believes agricultural subsidies are not going to farmers but to supermarkets, what regenerative farming does to soil organic matter over eight years and why that makes farmland a better asset than investors currently understand, and why his magic wand answer — predictable income for farmers, not subsidies — is the same thing he built his entire company around.

TRYING TO SAVE THE FARM OF HIS GRANDFATHER FROM A SALE

The farm had been untouched for a decade. Gonzalo’s grandfather died in 2000, timing the exit perfectly. Input costs were rising as Spain joined the euro, and the old peseta-era economics no longer worked. His grandfather had deliberately not taught Gonzalo’s mother to run the farm, believing it had no future as a business. The inheritance was contested, debt accumulated, and by the time Gonzalo returned from Berlin, after finishing his Erasmus studies, the family was trying to sell. He talked them into renting him the 25 hectares instead, brought friends from Berlin to help pick fruit and translate the first website, and started sending boxes to Germany. In the first two years, his mother handed out cards in Madrid (“proud mother of an orange farmer”) and Gonzalo rented a van to sell face-to-face at farmers’ markets. The record, before a Guardian journalist visited in 2012, was 20 orders a day. The day the article ran, they received 240. The website collapsed.

“My parents, they were trying to sell; it was a big crisis here in Spain. I came back from Berlin when I finalised my studies there. And I created a website.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

KILLED HALF THE TREES — AND KEPT GOING

Switching to organic methodology on the clementines and a local mandarin variety did not go smoothly. The trees were already in poor condition after a decade of neglect, and the transition finished them off. Rather than replant immediately — there was no money, and no certainty the direct sales model would work at scale — Gonzalo stopped cultivating the failing trees and kept building from what was left. The half that survived became the foundation. It was a decision made out of necessity that turned out to be the right one: by the time the adoption model took hold and the economics stabilised, the farm had the financial base to expand rather than just recover.

“When we were switching to organic methodology, they ended up dying. They were in very, very, very bad conditions. It was me — Gonzalo, not knowing what to do.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

ADOPTIONS MAKE SO MUCH SENSE

The adoption model was not designed. It was discovered when customers who had bought citrus online started showing up at the farm and asking questions about how the product was grown, what the challenges were, how organic farming actually differed from what they saw in supermarkets. Gonzalo started sharing the bad news alongside the good. Then, when half the farm was still unplanted and he had no money to buy trees at five euros each, he asked visiting customers if they wanted to plant one and name it. The business-plan target was 1,000 adoptions in year one. In less than a year, 10,000 trees were adopted. The model changed everything: a farmer who knows at the start of the season exactly how much of the harvest is pre-sold, at a fixed price, paid in advance, no longer needs to negotiate with an intermediary or guess at market prices.

“I realised at that time that our customers were not people that we needed to sell something to, but they were really interested in how we were cultivating their trees. They were genuinely interested in how organic farming differs from commercial farming. And they were interested in the challenges, not just the good news.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

WHY THEY STARTED CROWDFARMING

By the time the original farm had more demand than land, neighbouring farmers in the Valencia region started asking Gonzalo to build them websites. He did that, during the summer months when there were no oranges to ship. Two months in, the requests expanded: not just a website, but the logistics, the customer experience, the technology, the communication support. Everything a farmer needs to sell directly to consumers across Europe but cannot reasonably build alone. That was 2017. Crowdfarming launched with eight farmers, all citrus and almond growers. All eight are still on the platform. The co-founders who joined, Juliette Simonin (who had turned down a hire offer and brought M&A experience from Axa) and Moisés Calviño (who built the first platform website in one month) — gave the operation the structure it had been missing.

“They were not asking me just for a website. They were asking me for all the services that a farmer needs in order to sell the produce directly to the end consumer. So that was the time that we started thinking of creating Crowdfarming.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

THE CUSTOMER IS VERY FORGIVING IF YOU COMMUNICATE WELL

Crowdfarming does not run discounts and has never run a promotional offer. What it runs instead is continuous education: the customer base grows in its knowledge of what they are eating alongside the farmers growing it. When a hailstorm means no cherries in the mixed box, or apricots ripen two weeks later than last year, or mandarins are smaller in a dry season, Crowdfarming communicates in advance, explains the reason, and gives context. Customers who have been part of a farm’s journey for years through these communications understand agricultural variability in a way that no supermarket shopper ever could. The lesson from seventeen years of direct sales: customers are not the problem. Ignorance of where food comes from is the problem. Give people context and they forgive almost anything.

“I think our customers accept if there is a delay in the maturation of the apricots, or they accept if the mandarins this year are smaller because of many reasons, but you need to communicate in advance.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

DIRECT SALES MAKE THE REGENERATIVE TRANSITION POSSIBLE

The regenerative argument is structural, not ideological. A farmer selling through a supermarket or a commodity broker harvests without knowing what price they will receive. Their margin is squeezed from both sides. Any investment in soil health or organic certification carries cost now for a return that may or may not be rewarded in the market later. Crowdfarming’s model inverts this: the harvest is pre-sold at a fixed price before a single piece of fruit is picked. The farmer knows their income for the season before the season starts. That predictability is what makes it economically rational to invest in the soil, accept a conversion period, and take the risk of going organic. Organic matter in the Valencia region starts at around 2% and can double in eight years of regenerative management, meaning the land itself becomes progressively more productive and more valuable, in a way that no supermarket supply contract has ever been structured to reward.

“If you invest in farmland and you manage it regeneratively, at the end of the day what you are buying is a land that can produce this amount today, but after eight years you need less cost because your soil is already richer. It is not just inflation. You can measure this.” — Gonzalo Úrculo

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED:

Koen and Gonzalo also talked about:

• What Gonzalo would do with €1 billion. Education first (farmers and consumers), then farmland investment in underperforming farms whose owners farm conventionally not by choice but because no alternative conversion channel exists; magic wand: predictable income for farmers, not subsidies
• Regenerative farming increases soil organic matter. The building analogy: two identical properties, one maximised for short-term rental income, one slowly renovated; after eight years the renovated one is worth more AND commands higher rent; in agriculture the analogy is even better, because the “maintenance” (farming) generates yield throughout
• Subsidies benefit supermarkets, not farmers. His most contentious argument: CAP subsidies function as a floor that allows supermarkets to pay farmers less, because farmers can make up the gap with public money; the subsidy ends up in supermarket margins, not farm income; consumers pay twice — once at the till and once in taxes
• AI enables personalised regenerative farming. His billion-euro answer leads with education for farmers and consumers; he also sees AI as the tool that will eventually allow the kind of personalised agronomic advice that makes regenerative transition less risky for individual farm contexts
• Pick to order eliminates waste. Because fruit is only harvested when it has already been sold, there is no overproduction, no warehouse losses, and no need to grade out imperfect fruit; the reduction in waste across the value chain is structural rather than operational

LINKS:

• Crowdfarming

MORE INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES:

• Juliette Simonin – Teaching over 400.000 consumers that a farm isn’t a screw factory while selling them 4,7m boxes of organic and regen fruit and veggies straight from the farm
• Cristina Domecq – Building a regenerative movement by connecting 350000 consumers directly with 250 farmers
• Dan Miller on the crucial role of locally owned processing in regenerative agriculture

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.