Rice production, Italian heritage
The production Of Rice Italian rice found its maturity in the first thirty years of the 1900s, with families of laborers and mondine, in a page of history distant only in appearance. In the northern regions, cultivating diversified types of rice, every mondina proceeded to uproot harmful weeds and parasites from the plants while singing “Bella Ciao“, the song that would later become, with different lyrics, the flag of the Italian Resistance.
Those were the times when 500 people were employed for about ten hectares and rice production was processed in “amphitheaters“, a method now abandoned in Europe (but not in China). Where hands once worked, technology has arrived: new machinery, ideas, genetic studies and crosses on specific types of rice and modern production techniques have replaced the past. Part of the credit goes to Antonio Tinarelli (1922 – 2014), who, between the 1960s and 1970s, was able to create original species, diversifying production.
Today's rice production of the Belpaese has maintained very high quality, ensuring the minimum recorded use (or absence) of pesticide residues throughout the European soil, demonstrating how massive production can still meet organic and sustainable agriculture.
