As we can observe in many European countries, climate change has begun to cause tangible extreme events that are transforming the known landscape into a new one, damaging agricultural production to a large extent and highlighting the need for a change of perspective to increase the resilience of agriculture at all levels.
This is the case of the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna – central-northern Italy – which has been hit by several intense rainfall events in the last year and a half, causing extremely disruptive flooding in the countryside and local towns, with huge consequences for many of the most common crops, including the fruit production typical of the region, and the surrounding infrastructure.
The new project hub
FIRAB, the Italian Foundation for Research in Organic and Biodynamic Agriculture, which is responsible for setting up two project hubs on permanent crops, has decided to move one of the hubs – originally planned for the Rome area – to this part of Italy, more precisely to the south-eastern sub-region (Romagna), where fruit production (pears, peaches, apricots, kaki, kiwi, cherries, olives, grapes and many others) has always been its flagship.
The choice was made in order to add value to the knowledge materials already collected by the project leaders in recent months, which can be put to the test in a changing situation where the ability to increase the adaptive capacity of farms can be crucial to their survival.
In this way, the farmers participating in the redesigned hub will have access to innovative tools and practices that they may have neglected until now, and will have the opportunity to test several new agronomic practices in a dramatically climate-changing environment, and to add value to the results obtained by building new or more functional agricultural knowledge for this specific landscape.
Tools and knowledge materials
In a very diversified hub, the farmers express the need to try out some different organic practices, in particular green manures and cover crops, which can be planted and rotated in the row spacing, and agroforestry and agrosilvopastoral systems, which are suitable for fruit production and can become a valuable resource for diversifying production and making the farm more resilient.
Among the knowledge materials to be made available to farmers, those on soil health will also be carefully reviewed and possibly included in the farm adaptation strategies to be put in place during the course of the project, as flooding can have a significant impact on soil fertility and composition.
