Agriculture: Back to the Future

Agriculture: Back to the Future

As in the famous film produced by Steven Spielberg: “Return to the Future” in 1985, directed by Robert Zemeckis and played by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd also for agriculture began the great revolution that will give a new Faced with the oldest human activity.
And it is true that this is about 10,000 years old, forgetting the black and black period that goes from the end of World War II to today, with the illusion of industrialized agriculture, exasperated mechanization, chemistry and poisons To control the “ecological mistake” of Man, then we are going to, even in the thinning of the fog of cultural, scientific and technological reduction to a real and real Future of Agriculture.
A Return to the Future at Steven Spielberg, where the shots and “what you do not expect” will be on the agenda and where the consequences and the seeming paradoxes will reconfigure the whole scaffold of the most fascinating of human activities: Agriculture.

Already, statistical data tells us about a combination: Agriculture and innovation, which is under the eyes of everyone: it is about young people and employment. A lot of the guys who today have decided to invest their future in agriculture. These are not groundless theories, but concrete facts made of unmistakable numbers: just think that today, only in the South, there are 26,587 businesses run by under 35, or 52% of those in Italy.
Dreams, hopes for ideas, want to reinvent themselves and invent – as we often repeat – innovating. Many of them have started their business in agriculture, thanks to the traditions handed down by their ancestors and have decided to renew these traditions, thanks also to technological advancement and study. Many of them, in fact, are young graduates or have followed a course of study that has allowed them to apply in agriculture.
Innovate, reinvent, create: young farmers are young people who, thanks to creative ideas and above all innovative, have been able to do business and create job opportunities.
But behind this innovation that many paint as technological, futuristic, innovative there is much more: there is a new feeling that, over the exquisitely technological plan, is developing and is becoming more and more form in a technology that is not But that will drag you with all the visions we’ve come up with here or somebody with great economic interests in the industry (see multinationals) would want to understand.
We are talking about a new holistic vision of Life where agriculture will only become an application appendix.
This new holistic vision is developing precisely from feedback generated by past mistakes, where the ecological crisis, environmental emergencies, and the suffering of entire populations are the product of an erroneous and misleading anthroplodic equation.

And while humanity would seem to be crushed under the weight of the great economic interests that would “denaturalize” agricultural production processes, that is, from the rubble of the recent past and the push for new (or at least modern) disciplines in the sector ( Philosophy, spirituality, ethics, human health, ecology, etc.) is taking shape in the agricultural model of the future.
A return to the future in which we could represent the backward journey of new Marty McFly and Emmett Brown (man and science) to review all the logic and parameters that here have been the logic of the agricultural world.
A return to the unfinished future without a backward journey in the past, as in the stunning Stil Spielberg trilogy, where contacts between ancient traditions and illusions and new wisdom derived will shape the agriculture that will be.
An agriculture that will have to move within the codes of Nature, the only depositor of Ecological Truth, and the only possible one in the past, present and future.
Agriculture within biodiversity canons, eco-sustainable processes, attention to healthy nutrition and an ecological footprint to planetary and human dimensions.
Biodiversity and therefore also the proximity of processes, relationships, ties, relationships where production and consumption are ever closer, where the identity and typicality of processes generate that new potential energy that the whole new story is waiting for. Where the illusion of a mockery production by the so-called “Nature Codes” is likely to lead Man and Planet in a collision course for an unbridled race to a consumerism that comes out of both thermodynamics and real economy.
Therefore agriculture is more sober but more human; Real generator of a new concept of well-being not only based on monetary (now failed in the true sense of the word) but of a well-being based on a real balance between the whole human being and the whole planetary creature.
We begin to imagine a new rural civilization from which a new urban civilization will emerge, the one and the atria today severely dissipated by capitalism and market surreptitious and often fictitious market economies (where international agreements and artificial laws of “free market” They can not solve the great self-generated crisis).
It will not be the drones or the futuristic technologies to change this civilization (these are only useful applications only if serving a process ecology) but as in the holistic principle, “the functional summation of the parts is ever greater / different from the sum of the performance of the parties Taken individually “.
Thus, true innovation will arise from the crossroads of more knowledge and experience in which the encounter of the time machine and its components with the traditions but also the illusions of the past will generate (as it is generating) a new conscience.
They put their hearts in peace as many of those who advocate over-advanced technologies (hydroponics, offshore production, GMOs, robotics, etc.) believe they have found the solution.
The solution is not in technology (which is just a weapon, but always a weapon, and like any weapon that can be used to defend or kill). The solution lies in the holistic comprehension of Reality much more complex than economists, politicians, and multinational executives would like to make us understand.
And since holism is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “… the tendency in nature to form whole that is greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution, then it will be precisely the increase of the Factors of biodiversity, diversity, and components of agriculture to completely recalibrate the whole vision that too many scientists have.
Suffice to think that despite the existence of 50,000 edible vegetable species, our prehistoric progenitors based their diet on only a thousand, and in the Neolithic it was just a few choices. Since then, things have not changed much: domestication of new plant species has practically stopped 1,000 years before Christ. In fact today we only use 150 plants to feed. Not only that: the world’s 2/3 of the calories we consume come from only three crops: corn, wheat and rice.
But this is just one of the aspects and not even the main one: today farming techniques have evolved on the concept of production specialization and not on diversification (including varieties and genetics) of productions. The result is continuous use of external regulators (poisons and pesticides) to correct a holistic error in production; The sum of the individuals is greater than the ones: moral of the fairy tale? Road with no chance of return if you do not have an immediate and sudden “Return to the Future” right in the eyes of great director Steven Spielberg.
The risk is imminent: in a world where the climate is changing and becoming more and more unstable, targeting few crops for the sustenance of billions of people is definitely a danger. Certainly the cereals and legumes that we have available offer many advantages, are predictable and easy to reap. But with time they are also becoming increasingly vulnerable to parasites, morbidities, and mood swings, just because they are alienated from holistic principles and cultivation outside the “Codes of Nature”.
Looks at the parallel with rising temperatures we see an increase in “human temperature”: unhealthy diets, lack of seasonality, nutritional poverty (if not absolute) are generating new and ever-increasing illnesses so much that we no longer know if it is more dangerous The environmental temperature of the human.
To make a further contribution to this, which is not a theory, according to the Institute for Higher Protection and Environmental Research in Italy, no more than 10 per cent of the varieties present in the territory are currently cultivated, many of which have been attested since Ancient times, are destined to extinct.
If we add to this impoverishment of agricultural processes and ecological knowledge then the picture is clear and worrying. In addition to creating new crops (see OGM and Company) it is perhaps even more important to save those that we already have and to organize them in a holistic production model that respects the environmental and human temperature.
The future has already begun and can not be stopped.

Guido Bissanti