(Applause)
I am a farmer.
My sisters and I run a farm.
We have always done other things too,
and perhaps this gives us an attitude
to try and break with a traditional production pattern,
try to change something.
Maybe we’ve learnt it from our parents:
they too were farmers and also eclectic people
We try to have the so-called ‘lateral approach’ to problems.
Do we make it? We will see!
Our great-grandmother Regina –
actually her name was Caterina, but everyone called her Regina,
farmed the land in Friuli countryside.
She planted wheat, corn,
beans between corn rows,
and she burned olive tree twigs
so Saint Barbara would bless her
against lightnings and storm
Today we may smile at these superstitions
but they give you an idea
of how scary it was, back then, to lose a crop.
It meant hunger.
Our great-grandmother Ida farmed the land in the Venetian plains,
selling fruit before the hospital.
After the corn flowering she cut the plant over the ear
to feed the animals with that part of green,
and the ear matured with the leaf’s remains
A ton and a half of product per hectare would have made them happy!
Today we yield 12, 14 tons.
but David Hula, a farmer from Virginia, takes the cake
with 33.3 tonnes per hectare
Not bad!
Corn is a plant with a stunning potential.
I would like to share some thoughts on agriculture with you
Agriculture is a cycle, it’s the passing of seasons
it’s time, it’s bad weather,
it’s planning, it’s investment, it’s risk.
Agriculture is where you belong but also a perspective,
it is tradition but also future.
So what I ask myself today is,
can we innovate our traditions?
Can we take them, innovate them
improve and deliver them to the next generation?
Agriculture is what gives us food,
it has to feed an increasingly crowded planet
Farmers have never shied away from this challenge
for example when they fed a Europe
that was devastated by the Second World War.
And they did it by innovating,
for example by introducing mechanization
moving from this to that.
But the time of progress is not the same for everyone and everywhere
This is Dario today, on the Andes, tilling the land.
That is Giampaolo, today, in the Po Valley
tilling the land.
We have also introduced fertilization to nourish the plants
or chemistry to protect them from diseases, from weeds
and move from this to that
Those women were “mondine” [women rice field workers],
who spent hours and hours with legs soaking in the water
to clean the rice amongst mosquitoes and all the rest.
By far the most important innovation
the one responsible for 50 percent
of the increase in production over the years
is genetic breeding.
That man is one of the greatest Italian geneticists,
he really taught agrarian genetics to the world.
His name is Nazareno Strampelli and it is also thanks to his work
if we have moved from growing such a tall wheat to a shorter one
And why do we want small-sized plants?
Well, because high plants wasted many resources
to produce stems and leaves
and little grains
They were all too easy to fall, they flattened
and then it was complicated to harvest
and the product got rotten, and was of poor quality
The plants obtained by Strampelli are lower and more productive,
so they can be fertilized
and the product is of higher quality.
Time has led us
to feed two people per hectare of land farmed in the ’50s,
to four and a half today.
In the ’50s, a farmer could feed 6 people
today 50.
Thanks to these innovations
we have been able to produce more
and we have released labor force
that shifted from agriculture to industry and services, thus developing them.
Children could then go to school instead of working in the fields.
Today agriculture is being asked to produce more
without increasing soil use,
without increasing environmental pressure,
a better-quality product, at affordable costs
and satisfying more and more demanding consumers
In short, agriculture must be sustainable.
Sustainable for the environment, of course,
But also for society,
which must be able to know and share our production methods
And sustainable for the economy:
a farmer must be able to live in dignity, out of his work.
If one of these three “legs” is missing
the entire production process can’t stand,
agriculture is not sustainable.
This being said, I would like to change subject
and tell you the tricks our brain sometimes fools us with.
Albert Einstein said that it is easier to break an atom than a prejudice.
A prejudice is a wall in our minds.
We tend to make decisions
based on emotions, rather than on intellectual analysis
Our brain has evolved in conditions
where the priority was not the refined reasoning
but quick decision-making
This saved our lives, and this has evolved through selective pressure.
Even in herd life, the priority was to become part of a tribe
because it gave protection.
Still today, our brain
tries to protect us from new ideas.
It struggles to preserve our sense of belonging and identity.
New ideas are a challenge
that lights up the same area in our brain
that elaborates physical threats.
That is why we tend to react strongly, sometimes aggressively, to new ideas.
Confronted with information questioning our beliefs
we tend to react, paradoxically, reinforcing them even more.
These are called cognitive biases,
they are very strong and we all fall for them.
Fighting ignorance, lack of information,
with more information
is sometimes equal to adding fuel to the flames.
Let’s look at what’s going on with vaccines!
I am convinced that this is still the best method,
also because if we know
how these thinking traps work,
it may be easier for us to dismantle them
Marketing knows them very well and takes advantage of them.
It does so in a perfectly legitimate way, but let’s remember it
especially when it comes to making decisions
that affect the future of our planet
Let’s see what happens in the field of agro-food.
A brief digression:
a hairdresser once told me “It’s without chemicals!”
to convince me to do a hair dye.
Now, not to mention that if it really was chemical-free
that hair dye would not work.
It would not even exist, actually, because chemistry is literally everywhere!
Chemistry is life, life is chemistry,
but we have been bombarded for years
by a bizarre equivalence
“natural = good”,
nature is good, artificial is evil.
Maybe it is worth recalling that nature can also kill,
for example in the case of ergot
which causes ergotism, a fatal intoxication.
Or that, conversely, human discoveries can save lives.
Let’s think about diabetics:
the insulin they use has been produced for years
by microorganisms
that are genetically engineered to produce human insulin.
In the past pig insulin was used,
but it had quite heavy side effects
nature,
strictly with no capital “n”
is neither mother nor stepmother.
It just minds its business.
And nature’s business is that every species struggles to survive.
That’s why ‘natural’ can also be fatal,
where artificial,
meaning ‘manipulated by men’,
can save your life.
Nothing of what we grow is natural, it never was.
Since men became farmers
they began to change plants, select them
improve them for their own purposes.
Confusing nature and agriculture is a shortcut
that apparently simplifies our decision-making processes
but is actually a closed road, a trap.
Nature is a precious resource, we must protect it.
Our survival is at stake.
But this is not the task of agriculture.
Agriculture is not natural, it is an artificial process.
Confusing nature and agriculture leads us to the ultimate paradox:
rejecting innovation
even when it lowers the environmental impact.
The most striking example is Bt corn.
It is a variety of corn that’s genetically modified
to protect itself from the attacks of an insect, the corn borer.
But in Italy we’re not allowed to grow it.
So, in order to protect our corn
from the attack of the corn borer
and to prevent it from becoming a disgusting, unsellable waste,
toxic to people and animals
we are forced to shower our corn fields with insecticide.
Let’s make another consideration:
when someone is sick, we ask for the latest medical finding,
or for faster speed in ICT.
We all demand it.
But at the same time this confuses us.
The pace of progress is quick,
sometimes too quick for a society to keep up without inconveniences.
So we all look for a comfort zone, for certainties.
Food is the perfect recipe: when it comes to food,
to eating the fruits of the field, something clicks within us.
We all want to be reassured that it sticks with tradition,
that it’s as it once was, like our grandmother did it,
deluding ourselves with a picture of the past
that, believe me, is way less rosy than it actually was.
We are preventing agriculture from innovating
and ultimately sentencing our traditions to death.
Yet, if we studied the early days of some of the dishes
that are currently deemed typical of our kitchen,
we would be amazed.
Eggplant (melanzana, in Italian), for example,
was brought to Italy in the Middle Ages by the Arabs
According to some sources, its name comes from “mad apple” (mela insana)
Even potatoes and tomatoes, as you know
are native of South America.
In Europe, they were considered poisonous for a long time.
But a very interesting example is that of pasteurization of milk.
In the mid-nineteenth century, in American cities,
child mortality had reached 50 percent,
largely because they were used to drink fresh milk.
When the obligation to pasteurize milk was introduced,
people took to the streets, there were violent riots
they did not want to know anything about this news!
They thought it was a fraud devised by industry
to succeed in selling a deteriorated product.
Notice that those mental processes
are still the same today.
Yet child mortality fell by two-thirds.
Let’s try to disassemble
a typical dish of Italian tradition: pasta with tomato sauce.
Wheat to make pasta comes from the total fusion
of the genomes of two different wild plants
that randomly happened in nature
thousands of years ago.
GMOs, where a single gene is moved?
Here all the genes have moved, without any human intervention!
We may say that wheat is a natural GMO.
And the tomato the sauce is made with comes from South America.
Want some basil?
That’s ok, but be aware that it is native of India.
Then the conclusion of this delicious pasta with tomato sauce and basil
is that perhaps Italians are really good at innovating,
taking the fruits of the world and putting them together
Can we innovate our traditions?
Because we have come to the point that if we want to save them
we really have to apply
a good dose of healthy innovation to them
But what does innovation mean in agriculture? Why do we need it?
We need to change because over time our production processes
become obsolete, expensive, inadequate to the challenges of the planet.
We should innovate because pathogens change over time
and we need new methods to protect our crops
without increasing environmental pressure.
We should innovate because climate is changing,
we should adapt plants to the environment, not vice versa
We need plants that deal with high levels of salt,
plants that deal with drought,
or viceversa, plants that deal with floods.
Climate and environment are changing
and we cannot be caught unprepared,
given that we have all the skills to do so.
We have to innovate because markets and the society itself change over time
and we need flexibility to adapt to their needs.
Let’s look at Made in Italy.
It is a great success, requested all over the world.
Food industry exports are constantly growing.
We are pleased of it, but have you noticed?
I said food industry, not agri-food,
because we only meet half
of our food and feed grains,
and only a third of our vegetable protein requirements.
The rest is imported.
This means that the products needed to produce the feed
we give to animals that will supply our Made in Italy –
hams, cheeses, salami and so on –
are largely imported and often genetically modified.
They are completely safe, be it clear,
but let’s also be aware
of the absurd paradox we got stuck in.
We prevent Italy’s farmers from growing
what is then mass imported to produce the Made in Italy!
It is an economic suicide!
It is scientific nonsense, a legal mess.
It’s a fraud!
So, if we want to save the reputation of Made in Italy
and Italian agro-food
we need efficient, productive, innovative agriculture.
That is why there is no contradiction between traditional product and innovation.
Innovation and progress are the key to sustainable agriculture,
and this goal is achieved more quickly
if farmers and researchers work together
each with their own skills.
Let’s leave researchers free to do their job,
leave farms free to choose the tools they need
to stay in the market.
An economically viable farm
is a farm that can open its doors to society
and proudly show how it works.
Environmental protection is a priority also for us farmers
because we work, and often live, in that environment.
Then maybe we should ponder
that today’s tradition
was our grandparent’s innovation.
Because for us farmers, it’s tradition to innovate!
Thank you.
(Applause)
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