Among the green of the Marche countryside, in Cartoceto , in the Pesaro and Urbino provinces, it is possible to find the antique heart of Marche, among the farmers who through generations hand down the secrets of their productions and who resist despite the difficulties.
Aleksiej Giardini is thirty years old and from the time when he was fifteen, he has worked in agriculture: he chose to farming the lands where his grandfather, Egisto, and his father, Viscardo, used to work. “I tried to work in an industrial plant, he tells us, but I resisted only one year and thus I decided to cultivate the same lands that in the 50’s were cultivated by my grandfather and twenty years after also by my father.”
Afterwards Aleksiej’s father bought this agricultural company: twenty hectares of property and seventy in management, cultivated with extensive cultures and olive trees. In XII century thanks to the particular orographic conformation Cartoceto became the most important center of the’contado’ of Fano, for the olive tree cultivation and production of the best oils. November is a period of olives’ collecting and pressing, when the main square of the small center of the Marche turns into a big market where the olive growers and local oil mills present their products. It is the most important market-exhibition of olive trees and olive oil of the territory.
“We collect our olives and produce oil. Our company, Aleksiej explains, is a reality that has its strength in the family and in the love that connected us with the land, from which we always learn something and that guide us with its values and equilibrium and that we tried to transmit in our mode of producing. Of course, the costs of production are high, but our clients identify the passion that we put in our work and the quality that we offer them.” “I remember that my father used to use the technique of agrarian rotation, it means changes in cultivations and regulation of the return of coltures to the same fields: one part of land used to be cultivated under cereals, another one under sugar beets and the other under the herbs for cattle.
Today it is a mandatory choice: the market caused the eliminating of the quota for sugar production to this area and as a result we passed to the cultivation of cereals, olive trees and pig breeding. This one in order to avoid the dead periods.” Aleksiej’s work is constant and lasts for 12-15 hours a day. “In the end of October we seed cereals and in June we begin the threshing of grain and harvesting of other coltures. After their maturing, we collect them one after another. After the harvest begins the period of the lands’ plough for the following seeding. And thus the production circle begins once again.”
“Today we cultivate to sell in a market that does not give any guarantees. The price of production for a quintal of wheat is about 30 euro. The same quintal this year was sold for 24 euro. If one manages to get even without taking into consideration the hours of work in fields, it is good.”
In Cartoceto you might feel like being in a different era.
Aleksiej left his work in the fabric to be a breeder, olive and vegetable grower, creating in this center a short supply chain to fight the crisis with quality, selling directly to the consumer. It is a passion that, as we said, comes from the past. “We must be able to look behind, to our roots, history, points of departure and be able to tie the tradition and today’s innovation without forgetting the respect of the environment, harmony with nature, love for agriculture and its cultur.”