Gáldar, on Gran Canaria, spends four days from Thursday talking about farming. The most concrete case study in the programme, though, sits on another island and fits in a school kitchen.
The CEIP Valverde on El Hierro prepares 276 meals every day. They feed its 270 infant and primary pupils and the pupils of four small rural schools (Isora, San Andrés, Guarazoca and El Mocanal), which get their food ready-made. The school in La Restinga is linked to CEIP Taibique. Across the island, the canteens in the programme serve 659 diners.
The scheme behind it is Ecocomedores, run since 2013 by the Canarian government’s agri-food quality institute, the ICCA. As of February 2026 it counted 197 canteens and about 36,000 diners across the archipelago. Each year the institute handles roughly 250 tonnes of organic food from nearly a hundred Canarian producers.
For a small organic farm, the hard part is rarely the price. It is knowing what it will sell next month. A school canteen orders steadily through the whole school year, which a Saturday market cannot promise. This is a short supply chain that runs through public procurement rather than direct sales.
CEIP Valverde also holds regular meetings with families and takes part in organic school garden and composting projects. One of its suppliers is El Pinar, an organic butcher run by Francisco Febles and Nancy Acosta, certified organic since 1996. It manages about 160 head of cattle at Nisdafe, processes and sells its own meat, and ships to organic shops on every island. When regional minister Narvay Quintero handed out recognition plaques to the school and the butcher on 6 February, the next step came up too: El Pinar plans to start poultry production with the island’s poultry slaughterhouse, which the Canarian government is funding with €100,000. That detail rests on a single source, RTVC’s report.
Now the conversation moves to Gran Canaria. From 22 to 25 October, Gáldar hosts the 9th Agroecology and Biodiversity Forum, organised by the ICCA with Gran Canaria’s island council and the town hall. This year’s theme is rural women and “the care of life” as a basis for food production. There are six sector meetings open to all islands, including the 7th Ecocomedores meeting and the 5th meeting of procurement and management officials, the people in public administrations who sign the canteen contracts. On Sunday 25 the fair brings producers, seed networks and a traditional seed swap.
Some questions stay open. Gran Canaria’s island council puts more than €230,000 a year into organic production, which shows how much the sector still leans on public money. And the official material does not say what share of a canteen’s needs local farms actually cover, or how many small producers can handle the paperwork of a public tender.
For a herder on El Hierro with 160 cattle, that is the real difference: a tender written so that he can apply.
