Come on Guys, the earth is low, hard, but fascinating and beautiful, and it's the best occupation there can be! My grandfather used to say to me: "You see Paoletto, during the war, I sold a wood, and the whole family managed quite well". I would like to start from this statement and all its implications.
The Land, the Family, true Values. In a historical moment, in which it seems to me that we are once again at war, not in the traditional sense, luckily and at least for us, and we have lost every point of reference, the Earth represents the only true value we can rely on and from which we can draw all the elements for a better life.
I believe that those who stay in the countryside have a double scenario ahead of them: on the one hand, transferring traditional and ancient values to the new generations, on the other, being able to maintain and develop an activity with the most modern organizational and technological systems available.
The transfer of traditional values is the most difficult thing because it is a mix of the ability to do a job, to know how to build a piece with iron on the fly, to feed an animal, understand when the forage is ready to mow, or how to light a fireplace if the wood is green and it's cold outside etc etc.
A thousand of these things every day, every month every year! I will be told: you are medieval because modern organizational systems and technology are at your disposal, and you can buy whatever you want! But they cost a lot, as my children say, and therefore are difficult to acquire, unless you have a forest to sell or a Community agricultural policy of very long-term financing at almost zero interest.
Debt has already been one of the tools for the development of every company since the world began. The grandfather, the one from the woods to be clear, used to say: if you make the land indebted, you're finished! Whatever type of loan they offer you, it is almost never possible to repay it in full because one year it rains, another it is dry, then the price of the products drops because there is overproduction in America or China no longer buys corn for chickens… …. and how many more do you want!
So it's difficult, complicated, fought, but unique and unrepeatable. So what is the synthesis: my personal thought is to maintain what one has or what is left by the family, try to give it the right dimension for one's own reality, family, territory, market; do not hope to see your land transformed into a building area, because that sector will be at a standstill for at least two generations, because we have abused it too much, and try to find an acceptable balance between tradition and technology, between the craft and the digital.
In short, we have to think in the long, very long term and take into account that on the one hand there is a part of consumers willing to spend more and more to eat better the real products of the earth (quality), and on the other a practically infinite number of people that he will have to eat to live and will need cheap food.
The challenge is all here dear guys, you have to maintain, improve and position yourself in one of these two segments. Your Comet Star is this: an eye on the market (your pocket), an eye on the field (your company), an eye on time (your true antagonist always)! She says: but we don't have three eyes, true, but the two you have you have to keep open 25 hours a day! And now let's go to the garden to see what's ripe to pick.
