Alexis González leaves home at six in the morning and, nearly every day of the year, gets back around ten at night. That is how Canarias7 describes him in a profile published on 18 October. He is 37, like his wife Yanira Mendoza, and together they run Agrícolas GM: more than 45 hectares between Moya (El Lance, Los Dragos, Lomo Blanco, Santa Cristina) and Santa María de Guía. They grow over a thousand tonnes of potatoes and about seven hundred tonnes of onions a year, with a little more than ten employees.
On Friday 16 October, at the VIII Feria Insular de la Papa in Teror, the Cabildo de Gran Canaria gave them two awards: Alexis as Joven Productor and Yanira as Mujer Rural. The rest of the programme was technical, with variety trials, a tasting contest and a heaviest-potato competition (the winner weighed 1.297 kilos). The couple’s most interesting story, though, is about paperwork.
In January they became, according to Canarias7, the first owners of a Canarian potato farm under shared ownership. Before, they were two separate self-employed workers, which caused trouble with hiring, property and taxes. Now management, administration and responsibility for the farm sit with both. “Nos gusta esta fórmula. Normalmente el autónomo es el hombre y la mujer una simple empleada,” Yanira says: we like this arrangement, because usually the husband is the self-employed owner and the wife is effectively an employee. The model comes from Spanish national law 35/2011, and the paper says a Canary Islands government measure lets married couples and registered partners adopt it.
How little it is used shows in the numbers. According to eComercio Agrario, with data as of 1 October, Spain has 1,663 farms registered under shared ownership, 770 of them in Castilla y León. For the Canaries and the Balearics the article says “very small figures” without giving a count. It blames bureaucracy, patchy information and a culture where the legal holder is usually the man even when decisions are made together.
The link to sustainable farming is less about agronomy than about continuity. Generational renewal is a problem the couple themselves list among the sector’s troubles, next to labour shortages, cheaper imported perishables and the EU-Mercosur deal. A farm where both partners hold full standing is easier to hand on, to finance and to make appealing to someone under forty. The profile says nothing about irrigation, energy or soil management, so nothing can be said about their growing practices. It does record eight tractors and, in the couple’s telling, specialised machinery that has cut physical effort and made better use of labour and resources. Alexis puts it this way: “No tiene nada que ver la agricultura de hace diez años con la de ahora”, farming today has nothing to do with farming ten years ago.
Gran Canaria’s figures put their work in scale. According to Cabildo data reported by Canarias7, which cite ISTAC, the island grows about 1,200 hectares of potatoes, 90.5 percent of them irrigated, and in 2025 produced over 49.2 million kilos. That is more than 62 percent of the potatoes eaten on the island and 44.28 percent of consumption across the archipelago. Cabildo president Antonio Morales spoke of food sovereignty, costs, access to water and fair prices.
One caution: the portrait of Agrícolas GM rests on a single source, Canarias7, and the farm’s figures could not be checked elsewhere. The award and the fair’s data appear in two pieces from the same paper and in the Teror town hall’s programme. A question remains that no source answers: whether shared ownership, on an island where almost nobody uses it, stays a one-off or opens a path for other families.
