Born a farmer

Miguel Angel Gomez has been driving tractors since before his feet could reach the pedals. He grew up in Ferreira, a small town in the Granada province in the shadow of Spain’s Sierra Nevada, surrounded by three generations of farmers and shepherds on both sides of his family.

That origin has stayed central to who he is. Though he went onto study agronomy and soil microbiology, he still claims the title of farmer most proudly.

"I very proudly identify myself as a farmer. Not a scientist or agronomist, though I'm those things as well. But being a scientist, an agronomist, those are things you study in school. Being a farmer is something you're born with."

Today, he manages around 40 hectares of almonds and cereals alongside his parents on the same land the family has worked for three generations. His work doesn’t end with his 40 hectares, though. Miguel also co-founded and presides over both Alvelal and Almendrehesa.

Moving Towards Regeneration

For Miguel, the shift toward regenerative practices began more than 15 years ago with small tests on the family farm. The catalyst was Miguel's supervisor at the University of Almería, a UN consultant and soil microbiologist who pushed him to apply what he was researching in greenhouses to his own land.

"The first thing was convincing my father, and above all proving to myself that it worked. The small tests and building slowly helped to create confidence to scale up,” he says of the process.

Convincing his father proved to be the hardest part, persuading him that covering the soil with plants was a support to the crop, not a threat to it. The results came gradually, then clearly. Soil structure improved. Water started infiltrating deeper into the profile rather than sitting at the surface and evaporating.

"The soil is like the skin of the planet," Miguel explains. "Before, we only hydrated the most superficial layer. As soon as the air and sun came, it heated up and was lost. Now we're able to go deeper internally. We hydrate the soil from within and it stays that way for much longer."

The Power of Action

10 years into his regenerative journey, Miguel Co-Founded Alvelal, a regional association to grow the regenerative movement in one of the most ecologically fragile regions in Europe. The southeast of Spain, specifically northern Granada, Almería, and northwest Murcia, where Miguel’s farm is located, has endured centuries of deforestation, overgrazing, and intensive agriculture. Annual rainfall now sits at around 370mm. Soils are still eroding. As Miguel describes it, “The crisis here is visible. Many farmers are struggling.” Through Alvelal, farmers receive technical support, training, access to shared machinery, and financial incentives that make the transition possible.

He also Co-Founded Almendrehesa, a farmer-owned commercialization company built to ensure that the regenerative premium reaches the people who actually grow the food. In this way he is supporting the growth of the market overall.

Almendrehesa was born from a practical frustration: regenerative farmers were producing better almonds, but still selling them at bulk commodity prices. Founded in 2016 by 21 organic farmers across the Altiplano region, the company was built to close that gap, transforming raw almonds into finished products including almond flour, oil, and protein powders, accessing international premium markets, and returning the margin directly to the growers.

“Since our founding in 2016, we have grown from a modest cooperative of 21 almond farmers managing 1,200 hectares and producing 36 tons of almonds, to a network of over 60 farmers cultivating 3,000 hectares and producing 125 tons,” Miguel explains of Almendrehesa. “Over the years, we have paid more than €4 million in fair premiums directly to local farmers, including additional support to promote gender equality in rural areas.”

Miguel's credibility as leader of the two projects, trainer and educator, rests on a triangle he's come to understand is rare: farmer, technical advisor, researcher. All three, in the same person, from the same territory.

“I want to help scale regenerative agriculture not only as an ecological practice, but as a viable business model that rewards farmers fairly,” he explains. “I’ve had the opportunity to benefit from regeneration and I feel a moral obligation to pay it forward. It helps that I am not someone who comes from outside to tell people from my region what to do. I’m from the land itself and I prove that regeneration works through my actions.”

Regeneration For People, Not Just land

Miguel leads field days, gives talks and webinars, and teaches young agricultural candidates entering the sector through Alvelal's technical support network, but his philosophy on what regenerative agriculture should look like goes beyond the practices.

A thousand hectares inherited by one corporate landowner, he argues, is a fundamentally different thing to a thousand hectares worked by seven families who have built and earned their place on the land. It's not just about the ecology. It's about who benefits, who stays, and who gets to make decisions about their own livelihood.

Almendrehesa's governance is built around this. “By combining a General Board with product-specific committees, we are implementing participatory decision-making processes that include farmers, partners, and other stakeholders. This ensures transparency, collective ownership, and alignment with the broader goals of environmental, social, and economic regeneration,” he explains of their methods of keeping farmer voices at the centre of the regenerative commercialization process.

"Our vision is to regenerate soils, ecosystems, and rural economies simultaneously. What makes this work powerful is that it goes beyond restoring land. It restores dignity, agency, and hope in rural communities that have faced decades of decline,” he shares.

What comes next

Miguel's vision for Almendrehesa in ten years is clear: a major, innovative commercialization project for regenerative products. "But a real one, not greenwashing. One coming from family farms, the farms that tie people to the land, not from large corporations,” he specifies.

Being part of Top 50 Farmers matters to him, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. Less about personal recognition, or even recognition for Almendrehesa, and more about what it signals to the people around him. He teaches young farmers entering the sector, and when the Top 50 Farmers selection came through, they took notice.

"They already see it as something positive," he says, "It’s opening a path in agriculture. The simple fact of giving visibility—I think it's a brilliant initiative."

It's that sense of obligation to the people around him that keeps him here. He could teach at a university. He could consult for a multinational. He doesn’t, because he believes the project matters, and because he thinks someone has to prove it works at scale, in one of the hardest climates in Europe, with family farms, not corporations. A real project, for real people, built from the territory up.

"My vision is a future where farmers are not the last link in the chain, but the leaders."

Written by Top 50 Farmers and Isabel Duncan