Changing your life is a matter of desire. If a desire becomes a fixed thought you have to let it go. “You can’t wake up every morning thinking you’re living the wrong life, you have to face the revolution.” It is this thought that led Alberto to choose to leave his father’s engineering degree and study to become a blackberry grower, which is something he knew absolutely nothing about. “I made a calculation of years: another 40 years of office work were not for me”, he says from the fields near Padua, where he lives and works with his wife Anna and little daughter Emilia. He changed his life and thought, he began to understand that in the real world – that of nature – you can’t make too many programs, that you have to work hard but keep fatalism, that more generally life cannot be determined as a mathematical calculation, but only address. And he feels happy.
Alberto is one of many new farmers that populate Italy, those who in 2020 raised Coldiretti’s data to a historic 14 percent of the number of young entrepreneurs in agriculture compared to five years earlier. And one of those who – at the same time as the spread of the movement that is also defining itself in Italy as the “Yolo”, You only live once – agrees that the only life we have is to be lived as you wish. Many of these new farmers, farmers and ranchers, are part of a platform that was born before the pandemic but which started working last year. Is called Agriexperience (agriexperience.it)a French girl founded it, Marianne, who after spending a milking weekend in France decided to bring the idea to Italy too, where she lives with her boyfriend. «The idea is very simple, it’s a marketplace where you can book experiences on farms», she says, «last year, as soon as the lockdown was over, we had just started but we managed to send 400 people to the countryside. Those who choose these experiences do so above all to get closer to another lifestyle, we are too far from nature and from a way of life that has always been part of our culture ».
Rural experiences are nothing new, in Italy there have been associations for years that put farmers in contact with those who want to share a few days with them: the network Wwoof It has existed for years with a profound philosophy of sharing, and in South Tyrol, Volunteering in the mountains allows you to live for free in the farms by serving in the fields, collecting hay and feeding the animals. Marianne’s platform is more touristy on the one hand – the experiences only last a day and the work part is not demanding – but on the other it offers what people want: a window into another possibility. “Everyone who comes to me intends to change their life. Somewhere in their hearts that thing is there – he says Amedeo, shepherd of sheep for meat in Alessandria – But it is better to forget the bucolic idea of the shepherd, we too live in stress and do not have a free moment. But it is clear that not everyone can do what they like every day, being in nature, being in contact with animals, I wake up in the morning and I’m happy “, he says, demonstrating that shepherds remain bucolic, poetic and in a certain way. sense even heroic. \
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Marika is 28 years old, she too is a sheep shepherd and produces pecorino in the Uccellina Park in Maremma. She made him his grandfather, and when he died she realized that she had to, and she wanted, to continue her work. He was 17 when he started, gets out of bed at 6am and returns home at 9pm, milks his 300 sheep and takes them to pasture with four protection dogs to ward off wolf attacks, sometimes for lunch she brings the animals back to the stable and goes to the gym, goes out on Saturday evenings for a few hours with her boyfriend if she doesn’t fall asleep and on Sunday afternoon if her parents take over. But she, she says, “when I’m alone grazing with the animals it’s my magic moment, it’s like being in another world, detachment from everything, it’s a kind of therapy“. It’s passion, he adds. I ask her what passion is and she says it is too difficult a question. I ask her what her happiness is and she says that it would be for her to see the family business have a future. Today the market is in crisis and she is full of debts that she will carry on her shoulders all her life, she says.
Riccardo also went to her with Agriexperience, who is thinking of leaving everything or following the “call of the shepherd”. And so does Emanuela: «The life of the breeder and the farmer is demanding, but it teaches the value of what we eat, how much effort it takes to produce it. They are tiring but full days, lived, you use the energy of your mind and body to do something. I quit last week because I want another life. I want to try to count on me, to feel the seasons. I don’t need everything that seems important in the life we live. Money? And what are they good for if everything else disappears? ‘
Source: Vanity Fair
