The keys to agricultural transition? According to WWF they are multifunctionality and sustainability — concepts that come naturally to women, which is why women are increasingly taking centre stage in agricultural enterprises.
Female farmhand, female cultivator, female farmer, female agricultural entrepreneur: do these professions sound strange to you in the feminine form? And yet agriculture is increasingly female. According to the Bioreport 2019, in Italy, out of more than 1 million 145,000 agricultural enterprises, approximately one in three (31.3 per cent) is run by women. Looking specifically at organic, of the nearly 50,000 organic agricultural enterprises, 29.6 per cent are led by women.
These figures are similar to those reported on 15 October last year by WWF on the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women, the UN-established international day for rural women. The organisation highlighted in particular how the percentage of women leading agricultural enterprises rises in the case of so-called multifunctional farms — that is, those which, for example, process and sell their products directly, offer agritourism, or carry out educational activities on the farm. And this, it is argued, demonstrates that women tend to make agriculture more "humanistic and sustainable" thanks to their natural inclination towards innovation and multifunctionality, their greater capacity for adaptation, their stronger connection with the local area, culture, tradition and local knowledge. This trend is also linked to the fact that women do not perceive the farm merely as a source of income, but also as a way of life.
And since, for WWF, the multifunctional farm is a preferred route to protecting biodiversity, achieving environmental and social sustainability, and promoting tourism and services, it follows that the ecological transition of the agricultural system is female. Women, as WWF has underlined, have been able to build, with creativity and passion, enterprises that are largely family-run, capable of responding to society's need for genuine food produced using environmentally respectful practices, personal services, social inclusion and attention to the protection of local traditions and biodiversity. These enterprises, more than others, have been able to counter the negative effects of the crisis by developing actions of resilience.
There are many stories of women in agriculture that tell all of this — every one of them remarkable. Together with Biorfarm, the first digital farming community through which you can adopt a tree by supporting small farmers and receive organic agricultural products at home directly from the grower, we have gathered two of them, from opposite ends of Italy, yet united by tenacity, inventiveness, courage and sensitivity.
One such story is that of the women of the Famiglia Ferri/Le Zilli farm, namely Carmen and her daughters Cinzia and Marianna, who live in Castel Rozzone (Bg). Cinzia studies languages and moves to China for a year, where she discovers and falls in love with bamboo, in particular the culinary uses of the plant. Marianna, who at that time is attending the Alma international cookery school, joins her in Asia for a short period and is also captivated by bamboo. Back in Italy, the sisters are determined to plant a bamboo grove and involve their mother, who is swept along by their enthusiasm. Together they bet on bamboo — a plant little known in Italy (with the exception of the giant variety), but one with numerous properties. "First and foremost, bamboo contains silicon, which is beneficial for bone structure," explains Carmen, "and furthermore, being a vegetable, it contains no fats or allergens. And at an environmental level it is a sustainable crop: it captures the maximum amount of CO2, needs no chemical herbicides, and requires little water because the canes retain it in abundance. It is a plant that does not need to be continuously replanted and can live for more than a hundred years."
Carmen continues: "Alongside the idea of growing bamboo, there was from the outset a desire to do so organically, in keeping with our ecological sensibility and our healthy approach to food." The three women rent a field in Treviglio (Bg), near where they live, and plant several bamboo varieties — in particular the Iridescens variety for shoots, which can be eaten raw, and the Sasa variety for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, infusions and herbal teas, and for the edible leaves from which a flour can be made to produce, for example, gluten-free bread and pasta (as well as the Christmas panettone). Today, five years on, there are now two bamboo groves and Carmen's farm receives a constant stream of requests for bamboo. When the time comes for harvesting or pruning, the family involves social cooperatives that support disadvantaged people in the work. Together they have also created a circular economy project against plastic — a 100 per cent bamboo straw, biodegradable and compostable, produced from the pruning off-cuts of the canes. The added value of the Famiglia Ferri/Le Zilli farm lies not only in being run by three women, but also in belonging to different generations: "The girls have the ideas, they sweep me along with their energy and positivity, while I handle the administrative side and contribute my experience." In the meantime, Cinzia has become a sommelier and has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants throughout Italy; Marianna works in a restaurant as a cook. They spend their free time strolling through the bamboo grove, in contact with nature. "Our dream now is to put some animals in the fields and create an educational farm to welcome the youngest visitors — like the time we hosted a group of children and made flutes with them out of bamboo canes. We don't currently have the means to build a facility for visitors, but we'll come up with something — perhaps a camper van or a tented camp!"
From Bergamo we fly to Salerno. Here is the Piana del Sele, where Famiglia Dell'Orto has been dedicated to growing apricots for fifty years, with five children who today carry on the business. On one side, the brothers are involved in cultivating and harvesting the fruit; on the other, the sisters — led by Antonella — are expanding the farm's activities: agritourism, the educational farm, and product processing. "It all began when my father decided in the 1970s to leave the city and move to the countryside to become a farmer. Today we children carry on the business, and we do it differently from what happens here in the Piana, where there is a great deal of intensive farming and where orchards have disappeared in favour of greenhouses. We wanted to convert the farm to organic, a choice that has its roots in our family's bond with the land and in the respect we have for nature. It is a vision, a vocation, and even if we have to give up some income, we are happy because we have a higher-quality product whose cultivation benefits the environment, wildlife and wild vegetation."
This sensitivity is, Antonella confirms, above all a feminine one: "Women are traditionally responsible for feeding the family, they are more attentive when they shop, and never more than now are we feeling the need to bring about a change. The world is asking it of us, imploring us." Antonella and her sisters also pursue with conviction the idea of multifunctional farming: "We recently produced an apricot liqueur that we dedicated to our father, and we tried making eco-sustainable Christmas trees from pruning offcuts. We would also like to offer an increasingly experiential form of tourism here on the farm. We joined Biorfarm to find direct contact with people, a relationship of trust, an exchange of experiences, and the success we are having makes us believe in what we do, in the diversification of the farm's activities. Who knows — one day, once this public health emergency has passed, we would love for those who adopt our trees to be able to come here and pick the apricots themselves."
If you enjoyed these stories about women, by joining the Biorfarm community you will discover many more (along with many other organic products). Like the story of Sonia, the eldest of four sisters who in Valtellina grows blueberries (and makes jam from them using her grandmother's recipe) while sharing her small world with the bees; or that of Antonia, a food technologist who in Puglia produces organic grapes and extra-virgin olive oil; or, again in Sicily, the story of Rosa, who cultivates prickly pears using ancient techniques handed down from generation to generation, and that of Maruzza, an agronomist in her family's citrus grove and olive grove who, thanks to her studies, has also introduced mango and avocado cultivation to the farm; and finally, the story of Stefania who, in the province of Viterbo, has installed a photovoltaic system in the family's olive mill and is taking part in a project to monitor CO2 in olive farms with a view to offsetting it. This is what women can do in agriculture!
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