Well, the water has mostly receded and my island is a peninsula again. This flood, 57.2 feet, got into all our lowest fields – the fields we didn’t plant in last season – and stopped right around the edges of the fields we used last year. I’ll post some pictures of the flood once I’ve put them on my computer. But first, as promised, here’s the thrilling conclusion to our three week Roman holiday….
Italian farms. In many ways, the farms we visited were a lot like ours. In a lot of ways they were very different. Personally, the ways they are different are the most interesting to me, so I’ll talk about those. I suspect that the core differences we observed are due to two things; gas is really expensive in Europe so they limited tractor use; and the supply chain is really short so the price they got for their vegetables is relatively low.
The amount of hand labor done on all the farms we visited, from 1 acre to 80 acres, seemed inordinate. However, because diesel costs $10/gallon, it seemed that most farms chose hand labor over tractor work. What amazed me the most was that things that we direct seed – carrots, broccoli rabe, chicories, etc – these farms seeded by hand. And I don’t mean with a push seeder. I mean, they literally scattered the seeds atop the beds by hand and raked them in. Even the largest farms we visited seeded broccoli rabe and chicories by hand. They also did most of their transplanting by hand. Farms in the US not much larger than us tend to use a tractor pulled transplanter for this task. But not the farms we visited. (Although most of them had a tractor mounted transplanter mouldering in the back of their barns.)
To me, the most impressive farm we visited was Azienda Agricola Paolo Giobbi, in Ariccia, about 40 minutes South of Rome. It was also the largest of the farms we visited. Paolo has become renown for his varieties of artichokes and romanesco. He saves his own seeds, and has refined his varieties to the point that he has different romanesco varieties for different months of the year.
What makes the feat so amazing is that in America, you can hardly find any commercially produced broccoli/cauliflower varieties that aren’t hybrids – and certainly not Romanesco. Yet his plants were some of the most vigorous and healthy we’ve ever seen – and open pollinated. Nice. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with growing hybrid varieties. It’s just a reflection of the mastery of his craft that Paolo is able to develop such a healthy and vigorous gene pool on his own.
On our last day in Rome, we showed up unannounced at a farm very much inside the city. Across the road that bordered the farm were mid-rise apartment buildings. At the far end of their field was a derelict Roman aqueduct.
This farm, of roughly 40 acres, sold everything they grew at a permanent market near the Vatican and what amounted to a farm stand. It looked like they had grown about 50% of the food in the farm stand at the time we visited. And this was in February. The pineapples they’ll never grow. But by summer, the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant etc will be theirs and I suspect the farm stand will be filled with mostly their own food.
What amazed us about this is that you basically had to already know this place was there if you wanted to find it. Signage was poor, and nothing about the building said “come here and buy our vegetables.”
Yet, this non-descript store (and its sister store near the Sistine Chapel) moved 40-acres worth of produce every year and made enough money to support what seemed to be three or four households. All this, at rock bottom prices.
We still are having a hard time getting over the amazingly low prices we saw. Prices for imported things like bananas and grapes were roughly the same as they’d be in America. But things grown in Italy, and especially things grown in and around Rome, were so cheap. Our theory is that this is a consequence of a very short supply chain. All the farmers we visited complained of the wholesale market driving prices down. As best we could understand, the wholesale market was quite literally a market, where growers brought their goods to be purchased directly by grocery chains or wholesalers who sold the veggies to grocers or restaurants. This means there was only one or zero steps from grower to seller and at most only one entity taking a cut.
By comparison, here in America, nearly 95% of the vegetables sold come from either California or Florida. As best I can figure, a head of broccoli leaving a field in California goes from the farm to a regional distributor in California, to another regional distributor in the part of the country closer to its final point of sale, to a local distributor, and finally to the grocery store. That’s three different middlemen between farmer and grocer taking a cut and adding to the price of that broccoli. This is the case even for locally grown produce here in the Northwest, I’ve heard that produce grown at Full Circle, our neighbor in Carnation, frequently travels down to a regional distributor in Portland before being trucked back to Seattle grocery stores. Efficiency!
The most fascinating part about all this is that I think this means our prices are as high as they are due, in large part, to the long supply chain here. That is to say, if it weren’t for the existence of big California farms and their long supply chains, our little direct market farm might not be financially sustainable because we couldn’t charge prices high enough to live off of. Is it possible that for the small-scale, direct market farms in America to be successful, we need large-scale agriculture to keep prices high?
On the other hand, if we can extrapolate from what we saw in Italy, it may mean that by returning to a truly regional food system, the price of healthy, high quality fruits and vegetables may become much more affordable simply by eliminating the number of people taking a cut as the food gets transported from point A to point B…. so long as the farmers can still make a living.
I so enjoyed reading your analysis of the small farms in and around Rome, and the marketing process compared to ours. We’re lucky in the PNW that we have a mild climate and can either grow our own produce quite easily, or buy from farm markets. But the country is huge, and there are many areas where I suspect this would not be the case. No simple answer. But how inspiring to be in an area (Italy, EU) where local, organic food is the norm, not an oddity. I found out from our Austrian hosts that GMO’s are forbidden in the EU. There’s a major difference! We loved visiting the outdoor market in Salzburg two days ago. New friends there (Beth and Wolfgang) are farming in Austria and selling at market two days ago. I think they have 35 acres. I’m going to try and forward your information to Beth. They are very successful and work incredibly hard, just like you guys. Bless you and thanks for the lovely pictures and forceful writing.
Judi
Really interesting piece!
I really love the perspective that you present us with – so complete as always. I am fascinated by the question that you raise about small ag needing big farms.