Rice production, Italian heritage
The production Of Rice Italian rice production found its maturity in the first thirty years of the 1900s, with families of laborers and rice weeders, in a page of history that seems distant only at first glance. In the northern regions, cultivating diversified types of rice, every weeder proceeded to uproot harmful weeds and parasites from the plants while singing “Bella Ciao“, the song that would later become, with different lyrics, the emblem of the Italian Resistance.
Those were the times when 500 people were employed for about ten hectares and rice production was carried out in “amphitheaters“, a method now abandoned in Europe (but not in China). Where hands once worked, technology has arrived: new machines, ideas, genetic studies and crossbreeding of specific rice types and modern production techniques have replaced the past. Part of the credit goes to Antonio Tinarelli (1922 – 2014), who in the late ’60s and ’70s was able to create original varieties, diversifying production.
Today’s rice production in the Bel Paese has maintained very high quality, ensuring minimal (or no) pesticide residues across European soil, demonstrating how mass production can still align with organic and sustainable agriculture.
