ITALIAN FARMING

Evening Star, Issue 25679, 31 December 1945, Page 2

ITALIAN FARMING

LIFE-BLOOD OF COUNTRY DIVERSE CLIMATE AND SOIL The curious Kiwi wonders many things about this ancient and complex country (writes P.H.W.N. in the ‘ N.Z.E.F. Times’). And, being a farming sort of fellow, one of the things he is most curious about is the land. Land is held in Italy in a variety of ways, and the method ;of holding it is mostly very different from our own happy and hopeful way of acquiring a fine large farm and a fine large mortgage and hoping that with the help of Providence and rising prices the one will cancel out the other. This optimistic method is less common in Italy, whose methods of settlement and farming often date back to the days of the ancient Romans. In a country where the white oxen mentioned by Virgil 2,000 years ago can still be seen pulling the same plough that his farming acquaintances used, it is not surprising that the land is parcelled out in an equally antique manner, or that the methods of agriculture are often , more or less as be described them in the 1 Georgies,’ one of the first farm text books of all time, written, in the odd way they had in those days, in verse. WAYS OF HOLDING.

There are really four main ways m which the land is held in Italy. The first, and worst, is that most prevalent in the poverty-stricken south, and in some of the mountainous districts. This is the (peasant ownership of tiny plots on which the owner can raise ■but the barest of livings, and in bad years not even that. Apulia, the Campania round Naples, and the more fertile parts of Sicily are terrible examples of this slavery to the land. Many people dislike landlords intensely —especially on quarter-day—but there is much to be said for a landlord who has capital'to spend On improvements, and reserves with, which to aid his tenants in. bad years. The wretched owner of a plot of land perhaps 20 yards square, with no possessions • and no bank balance, and only the mercy of the weather between himself and starvation, can spend money on neither improvements nor implements. What is the result? It can be seen everywhere, in fields farmed with' no help from modern scientific research, ploughed with the aid of a forked stick, and cropped on an iron routine to maintain the soil fertility that is the. only capital of a folk too poor to buy fertiliser.

It is true that some of these farmerowners are richer. While a decentsized tablecloth would hide the best part of some farms, the acreage varies, up to a normal maximum of some 50 acres, a truly vast estate. Some landihogs own as much as 75 acres, but only where some of their land is either woodland or poor grazing. The man who wants to be monarch of all he surveys in Italy would need to live down a well.

These peasant owners raise grapes and olives, sometimes wheat or corn, by grace of a subsidy, and, on • the smaller plots, great quantities of garden truck. Round Naples, for instance, the great plain that owes its fertility to the dangerous benevolence of Vesuvius produces every kind of vegetable. And. it is the incessant labour of the poverty-stricken owners that keeps up this volume-of-. produce. . You do not find richer farmers in the richer areas ,in t this country, but merely smaller farms. Sometimes, so remorseless is population pressure, and so desperate the land hunger in a land with so little industry, the richest land of - all supports the hungriest andl the'poorest farmers in the country, each farming an area that can barely keep him and his family alive. In parts of Campania the lation rises to 2,000 to the square mile; farmers, not city dwellers. Imagination boggles at the thought. DIFFERENT IN THE NORTH. Farther north, in Central Italy, one finds a very different sort of farm. Here it is much more general to rent your farm from a landlord, but not such a landlord as we New Zealanders know, who takes, in bad years or good, a fixed money rent. The proprietors here are much more intimately concerned with the vagaries of the seasons, for the usual tendency is crop-sharing —close cousin to.'our share-milking system, since the rent is a proportion of the crop. Fanners here commonly hold no more land than can be worked in comfort by the family—the traditional Italian farming unit—and on their laud they raise most of the family’s needs. With a landlord who' asks no money, and workers who, being his sons and daughters, can be refused it if they do ask, and with only some clothes and a few luxuries to buy, the Tuscan or Umbrian farmer gets along with little use for money, so that inflation worries him hardly at all. It can even profit him. He is, in fact, the most stable and secure mail in all. Italy. Landlords under such a system are naturally very interested in getting good farmers as tenants, and that interest has its effect. These farmers are far more modern-minded than their opposite numbers in the South. For instance, they use just four times as much artificial manure per acre. Their diversified farming, however, and their small areas, prevent any very big-scale improvements, so that this area still preserves something of that Arcadian quiet that the old poets found there. Driving through there to-day, one can see barefooted shepherd girls minding their flocks while they spin the wool for their homespun clothes on a hand distaff whose pattern can hardly have altered since the days of Julius Caesar. FARMER PAYS IN CASH.

Perhaps 50,000 families hold their land in this traditional fashion, against 1,250,000 who farm their own freeholds. But 'north again, beyond the Apennines, where the jinost technically skilled farmers in Italy till the rich river silt of Emilia, the Po Valley, and Venetia, we find a system that is more modern. Here the farmer pays a fixed yearly rent in cash. This has its advantages, for he knows his obligations and any additional yield from skill or fortune belongs to the tenant alone. Oif the other hand, bad years bring no lightening of tho load. The rent does not go down with tho returns. But the system works well enough on this rich soil. The lush irrigated' meadows of Lombardy are famous for the quality of the stock they raise, and the plains of Emilia produce so abundantly that the Bolognese, who sample that 'produce with a will, are nicknamed “ the fat ones.” Farming here is not entirely easy, for the rivers, like tho Missouri and Mississippi, have laid down so much silt that they often run above the level of their own plains. Only big-scale drainage and revetment works can keep the waters in check, and save the farms from reverting to marshland., These works were wrecked bv the retreating Germans, and will cost a fortune to restore. But they will be restored, for in Italy every acre is precious. Under this system perhaps

250,000 families earn their daily bread, or rather polenta, for maize is the staple food of the farmers of the Po. Last of all come the latifondi, direct descendants of the great Roman slaveworked estates. They run from 500. to 2,500 acres, a huge area for this country, and are mostly farmed by bailiffs and hired labourers, for absentee owners. You wall find them on the barrenlooking stretches of the Roman Canipagna, and in the southern and drier parts of Sicily, for although they are hungrily regarded bv the peasant, they are usually on land unsuitable to intensive sub-division. That does not alter the fact that they are often badly farmed, for .there is nothing _ worse than an owner who lives on his nibfits in Naples while his workmen slave neglected in Sicily. .This survey gives but a very general view r of how the Italian farms, for in a country so diverse in climate and soil, farming is infinitely various. It can at the best give some idea of how 2,000.000 families, perhaps 12.000.005 people, earn their living. Another 8,000,000 work. for wages on the land —wood-cutters, shepherds, swineherds, and so on. Add to these the figures of those engaged in industries directly dependent on the farm such as wine-making arid olive oil refining, tobacco manufacturing, . and a dozen others, and it can be seen that the very life-blood of Italy depends on agriculture. As in New Zealand, it is on the farmer that the whole country ultimately depends.