La adopción de una innovación agraria en España: Los orígenes del cultivo de la remolacha azucarera. Experiencias pioneras y su repercusión económica y territorial

Abstract

The present paper studies the beginnings of the adoption process of the cultivation of sugar beet in Spain, to be introduced in our country as an agricultural innovation in the late nineteenth century. A culture whose adoption-diffusion through the national territory has been very fast since its inception and especially intense over the years, currently occupying a clearly relevant role in the national socio-economic scene, both by the agricultural area it occupies as by the wealth it generates. We analyze the two pioneering experiences conducted in our country, which were carried out simultaneously but independently and with an ignorance of one another. They had a very different socio-economic approaches although they were conducted at two very close spaces in Andalusia: the fertile lowland of Granada and the irrigated land of Córdoba. This difference of approach decisively conditioned the influence each exerted in the early stages of the spread of farming to other agricultural areas of our country.