The same flat area abutting the Tiber (arc toward the NE) near Città di Castello, photographed in 1954 (above) and 2017 (below). The juxtaposition between directly productive agricultural spaces and sparsely productive or semi-natural agricultural spaces is enormously denser above than below.

Notice how in 1954 (above) all elements (both nature and arable land) tend to be rows. The area remained entirely agricultural from 1954 to 2017 but the nature of relevant infrastructure changes: the dense and pervasive nature/agriculture alternation of 1954, in 2017 is almost gone and largely replaced by construction serving mechanizations moreover employing fossil energy sources.

We are faced with natural farming when any land that is actually cultivated, for example, an arable land, is sufficiently juxtaposed by areas that are not cultivated and left mostly to nature. So agriculture and nature thickly intersected.
Natural farming practices rely on the intense penetration of nature within agronomy and within the economy. The homestead landscape is the result of this effort: exposing arable land, orchards, etc., to multiple specific ecosystems (such as hedgerows, scrublands, water points, dry stone walls, to name but four).

We have for millennia accommodated agriculture (agricultural biodiversity), within nature (natural biodiversity), and we have seen so far that practices that promote agriculture without a high presence of nature, create very serious problems.
Since 2014, a working group for the custodianship of GLCET land ecology, GL for short, has been formed in WOOF Italy APS, committed to studying and putting into practice suggestions and methods useful to the associational mission of WOOF Italy APS, namely to promote the development of natural agriculture as a lifestyle choice.

GL proposes to WWOOF Italy to increase awareness of the importance of nature in agriculture, to increase nature conservation on the farm and on the farm, to define if possible the desirable proportions between productive and non-productive spaces.
GL helped implement Resifarms, the Resilient farms and homesteads: more training for more ecosystem services provided by semi-natural farmland project funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus Plus program, which ended last Feb. 28 and produced a best practice guide.

Each section of the guide is devoted to a typical farm space that is functional in that it is nonproductive or very unproductive, e.g., field margins, tree-covered spaces, pastures. The guide directs to conserve and/or create these elements of nature by highlighting their services, that is, the economic benefit (ecosystem service) that the farm gets from “high nature value agriculture.”

From this link you can download the original English guide, and English versions of the four videos Resifarms has produced.

From this link you can download the Italian version of the guide and the Italian versions of the four videos. WWOOF-IT specifically co-funded the four Resifarms videos whose production was coordinated by Committee for WWF Oases in the Florence area the Italian partner of Resifarms.
Beginning with the hedgerow section, GL has begun to better adapt the Resifarms guide to the Italian context, and has for now produced a specific text on hedgerows, a text on flora to be considered relevant to hedgerows as well, and a text also relevant to hedgerows that describes part of the experience of Enrico Bocchi WWOOF member in Neviano degli Arduini (PR).

Certainly, hedges are an element of nature that is fundamental to the durability of any agricultural activity, and indeed agriculture that multiplies hedges and connects hedge to hedge, makes concrete nature.
WOOF Italy recognized the value of the GL proposal and the Resifarms guide and embraced the perspective nature must invade agriculture that encourages farmers and anyone interested in agriculture, to design farming practices with a naturalist approach. Last May, WWOOF Italy approved funding for a number of projects including the best practices of the WWOOF Italy widespread educational workshop proposed by some GL . This project began a fact-finding survey of practices in use among members to guard the land, inhabit it and cultivate it in harmony with nature. The project takes into account the fact that many WWOOF Italy members, with farms or not, while having considerable knowledge and experience of such farming solutions, share them too little. A very important goal of the project, which will end in spring 2025, is to provide a list of places where specific natural farming solutions are ongoing and visitable. Concrete, knowable, improvable actions are WWOOF-IT’s natural agriculture.

To get in touch with the project, write to marcellaleoncini75@gmail.com.

A section of the WWOOF Italy website will soon be the repository for the documentation as it is developed by GL (by the way, the reworking of the Resifarms guide sections is continuing). The documentation prepared by GL will almost always be updatable: for example, a glossary and a list of literature references on agriculture in general, the need to think about the biosphere and diversity, and the commons are being prepared. In the meantime, we will not waste time if we can give space for a hedge.

To get in touch with GL, write to sa_ffran@tiscali.it

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