We are only remembered when there is smoke in the sky
Farmers are called upon to fight wildfires with their equipment and resources despite systemic abandonment and financial hardship throughout the year. Agricultural sector faces chronic challenges including impossible regulations, depressed prices, and heavy taxation that have driven many farmers out of business.
- Pilar Pascual's TikTok video went viral during Spain's wildfire emergency
- Farmers face chronic low prices, heavy taxation, and impossible regulations year-round
- Agricultural sector has mobilized during pandemic, Filomena, and other crises
- Equipment farmers risk in emergencies represents million-euro investments they spend lifetimes paying off
Spanish farmer Pilar Pascual goes viral denouncing that agricultural workers are only valued during emergencies while facing year-round neglect, low prices, and excessive regulations.
Pilar Pascual woke up angry. It was another morning of wildfires sweeping across Spain, and her phone was already filling with messages—pleas for farmers to bring their tractors, their water tanks, their machines to fight the flames. She recorded a video on TikTok that would soon reach thousands of people, and in it, she said what many in her sector have been thinking for years: we are only remembered when the country is burning.
Pascual is a farmer, and her frustration cuts deeper than the immediate crisis. Yes, she said, the agricultural sector will show up. They always do. They came during the pandemic. They came during Filomena. They come whenever the nation needs them. But the rest of the year, she explained, the sector is systematically crushed. Regulations that seem designed to make farming impossible. Prices so low that profit margins have vanished. Taxes that feel suffocating. Fines that pile up. The cumulative weight of these pressures has driven so many farmers out of business that when emergencies arrive, there are simply fewer people left to answer the call.
"We've been cornered until we can barely breathe," she said in her video. The irony is bitter: the people the government needs most in a crisis are the same people the government has been slowly asphyxiating the rest of the time. Those who do respond to emergency calls are often already financially fragile. They are risking equipment worth millions of euros—machines they will spend their entire working lives paying off—to save other people's homes and lives. The personal cost is staggering. The economic cost is staggering. And it happens while the sector remains in what Pascual calls ruin.
Her message carried an accusation aimed directly at politicians: they have abandoned the countryside. They remember agriculture only when there is smoke on the horizon. The rest of the year, when farmers take to the streets with their tractors to demand basic respect and fair treatment, they are portrayed as obstacles, as nuisances. Pascual pointed out that the agricultural sector sustains the country—it produces food, it stewards the land, and now it saves lives. Yet that contribution is invisible until disaster strikes.
What Pascual articulated in her viral moment is a contradiction that has been building for years. The moment the fires are extinguished, she warned, the barriers will return. The fines will return. The institutional abandonment will return. And the sector will be left to absorb the damage—both the damage from fighting the fires and the ongoing damage from policies that make farming economically unviable. She ended with a statement that moved beyond the immediate emergency: respect for agriculture cannot be something that exists only when there is smoke in the sky. It has to exist every single day of the year.
Her video struck a nerve because it named something the agricultural sector has been experiencing for a long time—a kind of conditional visibility. Farmers are essential until they are not. They are heroes in a crisis and obstacles in normal times. The debate her words sparked raises a question that policymakers will have to answer: will this emergency finally prompt the sustained reform the sector needs, or will the cycle simply repeat itself once the fires are out?
Citas Notables
We've been cornered until we can barely breathe, and then they ask us to save the country— Pilar Pascual, farmer
Respect for agriculture cannot be something that exists only when there is smoke in the sky. It has to exist every single day of the year— Pilar Pascual, farmer
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why did her video resonate so widely? What did she say that people hadn't heard before?
She didn't say anything new, really—farmers have been saying this for years. What was new was the timing and the platform. She spoke during a crisis, when the country was watching, when the contradiction was impossible to ignore. She made visible what's usually invisible.
The contradiction being that they're needed in emergencies but abandoned otherwise?
Exactly. And she named the cost of that contradiction. It's not abstract. It's equipment worth millions, it's families going bankrupt, it's people leaving the profession because it's no longer viable. Then when disaster strikes, the government calls and expects them to answer.
Did she suggest what should change?
Not in policy terms, no. Her point was simpler and maybe more powerful—that respect can't be conditional. You can't treat people as disposable and then expect them to save you. The implication is that if you want them to be there in a crisis, you have to value them when there's no crisis.
Do you think this will actually change anything?
That's the question everyone's asking. Emergencies create political pressure for a moment. But once the fires are out, that pressure usually fades. The sector has mobilized before, been thanked, and then forgotten. Whether this time is different depends on whether people remember what she said when the smoke clears.
What's the human cost she's describing?
Financial ruin for people who are already stretched thin. Risking irreplaceable equipment. Working hours that are already unsustainable becoming even more so. And doing all of it while knowing that the moment the emergency ends, the system that's been grinding them down will start grinding again.