“If you really want to understand what is happening in the Po Valley, or at least part of what is happening, you should come to me.” Giuseppe Trecate doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he gets straight to the point. I meet him in February, among the tractors that were gathered to protest against the European Union. The valley is in turmoil: the farmers, at their breaking point, have decided to take action. Under the banner of Riscatto agricolo (Agricultural Redemption), they organise roadblocks and drive their farm vehicles through the cities. They have surrounded the headquarters of the Lombardy Regional Council on several occasions, demanding to be heard. 

So, what exactly is happening? How is it possible that the breadbasket of Italy, the most productive agricultural area in the country, is in crisis? According to a press release, “if things go on like this, 30 per cent of farms will close by next year.” Which farms are they talking about? And where does the data come from? 

These are the questions that cause me to travel across the plain, which appears uniform at first glance but hides subtle differences, unique stories and diverse experiences within its folds.  

Giuseppe Trecate’s farmstead is the first stop on this journey. It is located in Lomellina, on the extreme south-western border of the gigantic Po basin. Nestled between the provinces of Pavia and Novara, never knowing whether it belongs to Piedmont or Lombardy, it is an area overflowing with water, with rice being produced here for centuries.  

To reach the Trecate farm, you have to leave behind the straight roads that cross the plain like rulers, abandon the safety of road signs, and rely on ditches, field boundaries and remembered names that no longer appear on maps. Satellite navigation is useless here: it leads you along routes that end in a canal, or in the middle of a rice field. That’s why Giuseppe prefers to pick me up at Novara station. “That way you won’t risk taking a dip,” he jokes. 

He arrives in a pick-up that says a lot about its owner: the bodywork covered in scratches, the lingering smell of hay and diesel, the flatbed bearing the marks of a thousand days in the fields. Even Giuseppe’s worn-out baseball cap and dry handshake convey the same message: a straightforward man, no frills, more comfortable with practical matters than words. 

Giuseppe’s farm is not a farm in the traditional sense of the word. It is more like a living organism. There are courtyards that smell of dust and mud, corners filled with iron scrap and bolts, a workshop that looks like an alchemist’s laboratory. And then there’s the silence of the countryside, interrupted only by the cries of herons and the gurgling of water flowing through the canals. 

Giuseppe sows rice as they did in the old days: by flooding the fields. No dry cultivation, as almost everyone does now. “It’s more laborious,” he explains, “because you have to drive the tractor into the water. But it uses fewer chemicals. Water is a natural weedkiller.” 

The next morning, at dawn, Giuseppe takes me with him to sow. The slanting light of the rising sun reflects off the water covering the fields. Giuseppe loads a sack of seeds onto the back of the tracked tractor, drives into the flooded field and moves forward in a straight line. From behind, the machine throws the rice grains into the air like tiny sparkling arcs. “Once upon a time, you needed two men with two poles, one at each end of the field, to make sure you were going straight. Today, GPS is enough.” 

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Number of agricultural holdings in Italy (2000-2020):

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Giuseppe does not use water from the reclamation consortium for this process, but rather spring water that rises naturally from the aquifer. Very few people still use this method, which is more laborious due to the necessity of constantly maintaining the canals. “But then in 2022,” Giuseppe reflects, “when there was a drought, we had water and our colleagues were dry.” 

Giuseppe takes me to see an embankment. He points it out with restrained pride, like someone showing off a family heirloom. This is no ordinary embankment, but a collective construction: Giuseppe and four other farmers – “the last madmen in the area who use the springs” – built it with their own hands. They brought large boulders from the Alps by lorry and used them to reinforce the embankments at the outlet of the aquifer, which was in danger of being buried by mud. “We spent twenty thousand euros on it, but it was worth it.” When I ask him why they didn’t build a concrete embankment, he looks at me as if I’d said a dirty word. “Because it was ugly. I don’t want ugliness where I live.” 

Conservation Agriculture 

Between Giuseppe’s plots of land – his farm covers over a hundred hectares, which is average for this area – there is a forest. A real forest, not the usual ornamental rows of trees found at roundabouts. It seems almost out of place in this endless plain, where trees are seen as intruders, obstacles to be removed. Other farmers would probably have cut it down, ploughed it, levelled it, perhaps planted maize right up to the edge. Instead, he takes care of that wood. He enters it slowly, as if entering a church. “There are badgers, wild rabbits…” he says. “There’s even a pair of little bitterns.” 

“Little bitterns?” I ask.  

“Go and see what they are on the internet”, he replies like someone keeping a secret.  

There is no glyphosate at the edges of his fields. There is no catalogue perfection. There are weeds, but there are also wings: wings that migrate, return and nest. There are frogs, salamanders, sounds that are no longer heard in the neighbouring fields due to everything being perfectly weeded. Smooth. Silent. Odourless. 

We walk between the furrows and see other farmers on their tractors. Engines running, they sow in dry conditions, on well-ploughed fields. It is fast, efficient and clean. Giuseppe watches them without judgement. “If you intensify, you work less,” he says. “But I want to leave my son land that is at least as fertile as the land my father left me. I may be old-fashioned, but conservation farming is the one for me.” 

Giuseppe lets wild grasses grow along the edges of his fields, he uses groundwater and tends to a forest that he sees not as a hindrance but as a treasure. He wants his farm to remain a living ecosystem, not a sterile expanse governed solely by the logic of yield. This is a way of doing things he learned from his father, and which he instinctively carries on. For Giuseppe, cultivating the land also means protecting it.   

“Do you earn any more with conservation farming?” I ask. 

“Zero. Not a single penny.” No one pays him for his services to the ecosystem: the biodiversity he protects, the aquifer he cares for, the soil he regenerates. He could request subsidies from the European Union, as part of the so-called environmental eco-schemes. “But there’s too much paperwork, and besides, I think this way of farming should be part of our job. We should just do it. The gentlemen in Brussels don’t have to tell us.” 

Like all tractor drivers, Giuseppe hates the European Union. He says that every year there is a new acronym to learn, a new form to fill in, a map to redraw. He argues that the suits who work for the Commission have no idea how to cultivate the land, and that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – the subsidy mechanism through which the EU supports agriculture – is a flawed system that should be dismantled. 

Giuseppe does not call himself an agricultural business-owner, but rather a direct grower. He doesn’t run a business with operating margins, business plans or three-year projections. Every year, he does his accounting his own way, by simply looking at his bank statement. That’s where he finds the numbers that really matter. “When things go well, I take home twenty thousand euro,” he says without any sign of resentment. That is the economic value of his work: twenty thousand euro for 365 days of work, on a farm of over one hundred hectares. 

Giuseppe’s rice – grown in spring water, cultivated with minimal chemicals and a great deal of patience – is not worth much on the market. Not because it is not high quality, but because the price is set by others. The arrival of Asian rice, which costs significantly less, has lowered the bar, and then there are the rice mills and large retailers, which squeeze margins to the bone. 

“Once upon a time,” recalls Giuseppe, “it was divided up like this: one third went to the producer, one third to the industrial processor, one third to the distributor.” Today, the producer is left with barely 10 per cent: enough to cover sowing, fuel and maintenance. His existence is a searing paradox: it is not the fruits of Giuseppe’s labour that keep him going, but European subsidies. He detests the EU, but survives thanks to the CAP, which guarantees him around 300 euro per hectare through so-called direct payments. 

For Giuseppe, it’s all wrong: “We’ve created a world of freeloaders who produce no value and try to grab subsidies in whatever way they can.” And so agriculture is on its knees. Only the largest farms survive, those that can manage economies of scale. Since the CAP pays by area, the more hectares you have, the more money you have. And the more money you have, the more chance you have of buying more land.  

Giuseppe is a rare breed, and he knows it. He continues to grow rice the way it was done in the old days, even though it pays very little. But around him and throughout the plain, the landscape is changing. Small and medium-sized farmers are disappearing. Many are giving up, selling to large businesses or energy multinationals that replace agricultural fields with expanses of solar panels. According to the latest census data, the number of farms in Italy has more than halved in the last twenty years. This is a generalised change in the country’s landscape, more marked in the hills and mountains, but now also affecting the most productive areas of the plains.  

The responsibility of the CAP 

“At the root of this development lies a history of poor choices,” declares Franco Sotte, a professor of agricultural economics who has devoted his life to studying the CAP. Since retiring, he has lived in a small villa on the outskirts of Pesaro, where he cultivates a small orchard in his garden: ancient apple varieties, forgotten pears, cherry trees saved from oblivion.  

Walking among the trees, which he describes with such affection that they might be his children, he reconstructs the history of the Common Agricultural Policy. “The CAP played a fundamental role in the birth and consolidation of the European Union. For decades, it was the only truly common policy. And its merits are undeniable: in just a few years, it guaranteed food security for a continent emerging from war and famine.” Then, over time, it changed. What was supposed to be a lifeline turned into a tool of standardisation, rewarding quantity over quality, land area over history, large farms over small ones.  

The hardest hit is the kind of agriculture that concentrates more labour into smaller plots, producing high-quality, high added value goods. This is what is happening in Italy, a country that carries little weight in Europe in terms of hectares, but leads in agricultural employment and value created per unit of land. “One study has estimated that if funds were allocated not just based on hectares but also employment and the number of farms, Italy should have received – and should still receive – about 46 per cent more resources.” 

The result, Sotte notes, is a system that has prompted many to “cultivate the subsidy” rather than the field. “The truth is that CAP subsidies are like a drug,” he says. “Especially when taken for many years, they are addictive and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of innovating, diversifying and upgrading, people grow accustomed to receiving support.” 

“We tried to become the Holland, Germany, or France of wheat and milk,” Sotte adds, “forgotting that we were the country of a thousand vegetable gardens, vineyards climbing the hills, figs, aubergines, basil and oil. A fragile but precious mosaic, which over the years has been levelled and converted into an open-air assembly line.” 

Sotte insists that agriculture isn’t just about production; it’s also about preserving landscapes, biodiversity, and communities. “We’ve abandoned the hinterlands and prioritised vast expanses.” 

Today, the system is showing cracks even in its beating heart, the Po Valley. Not only because CAP subsidies are dwindling, but because that agricultural model, built on the idea of maximum productivity, is now hitting its structural limits. 

Climate hotspot 

Agriculture in this region also has to contend with an increasingly unstable climate. The Po Valley, a naturally flood-prone plain, is particularly vulnerable to atmospheric shocks. Sudden hailstorms destroy crops, while invasive insects attack plants that are already weakened. Drought alternates with torrential rains that wipe out weeks of work in a matter of hours. In Emilia-Romagna, the pear sector, which was once the pride of the region, has dwindled to the bare minimum: production has fallen by 70 per cent in ten years. Peaches have suffered the same fate. 

Since 2021, the region has experienced two years of intense drought and several floods, including those that devastated Romagna in May 2023. 

From her farm in Boncellino, in the province of Ravenna, Maria Gordini experienced the disaster first-hand. Just turned 70, she recounts what happened by her orchard, which is still buried in mud. “At first, it seemed like a normal storm. We’re used to them here. When it rains, we stay inside and wait.” But this time it was different. The Lamone River, flowing just a hundred metres away, burst its banks. The water rose quickly. Maria and her husband helped their son and daughter-in-law, who live with them, get the children to the upper floor. Rescue services were already tied up: in Ravenna, Faenza, all of Romagna. They waited for four long hours, which they spent playing games and drawing to keep the children from panicking. Finally, a small motorboat – “the swamp boat,” Maria calls it – took them to safety. Her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren chose to relocate, and never returned. Maria and her husband stayed. 

In the months that followed, they were hit by two more floods: another cyclone just two weeks later, and then again in October 2024. On both occasions, they managed to escape in time; the warning system had worked. When they returned, however, they found their house gutted and the fields covered in mud. Maria shows us her devastated orchard: fallen tree trunks, brushwood everywhere. Maria tells us of her apple trees, planted one by one, supported by old wooden poles, and uprooted by the fury of the deluge.  

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Common Agricultural Policy (2021 – 2027): main beneficiaries.

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Today, Maria is still here, removing the mud by hand, waiting for a clean-up that she cannot afford and that should be the state’s responsibility. Maria doesn’t cry when she talks about the destruction, but she comes close when I ask her if she has the strength to replant. She insists that she does, but the fatigue, the weight of age, is evident. 

Maria is one among thousands: one voice among many, symbolising a wider tragedy. The flood that submerged Romagna destroyed crops, fields and lives. It caused fourteen deaths, and it reminded us that, under the blows of climate change, those with fewer resources pay the highest price. 

The ugliest landscape in the world 

Floods and droughts don’t come out of the blue. Arriving from afar, driven by a changing climate, they find a vulnerable body here in the Po valley, an organism with no defences. “We’ve made fields as sterile as sheet metal, all identical, incapable of retaining, breathing, or mediating between heaven and earth,” says Duccio Caccioni, agronomist and director of marketing and quality at the Bologna Agri-Food Centre (CAAB). “We’ve transformed the Po Valley into the ugliest landscape in the world.” 

Today, the Po Valley – which was once a succession of marshes, floodplain forests, rice fields and canals – increasingly resembles a mechanical desert, where water, when it arrives, finds nothing to welcome it. It flows, it destroys, and it overwhelms. Or it simply does not arrive, in which case everything crumbles, stops and becomes barren. 

Caccioni rattles off figures that clearly illustrate the process. “Over the last sixty years, Italy has not only lost many hectares of cultivated land: it has lost its landscape. In 1960, crops covered 20.9 million hectares; today, only 12.4 million remain. Eight and a half million hectares have disappeared, representing an area equal to Lombardy, Piedmont and Sicily combined. Of these, 1.3 million – the size of the whole of Campania – have literally been covered with concrete.”  

Behind these figures lies the metamorphosis of a space. The plains have been invaded by urban sprawl: following the US model, city suburbs have stretched into the countryside, and industrial warehouses, shopping centres and logistics hubs have colonised every free space. Meanwhile, agricultural spaces have become standardised: the lowlands have been turned into large monocultures of maize to feed the intensive livestock farming system. Land on mountains and hills has been gradually abandoned. “Today, Italy seems to move along two parallel planes. Below: overpopulated, polluted, chaotic territories; and above: depopulated mountains and hills, uncultivated fields, abandoned villages.” And this abandonment leads to fragility. “Inexorably, those unguarded mountains, those neglected territories, are collapsing. There’s an urgent need to repopulate them, to ensure that CAP subsidies do not reward large surfaces at the expense of the heroic agriculture of the mountain areas, the small farmers who guard the territory.” 

Beer against hornets 

Gianni Fagnoli is one of these mountain heroes, and one of the few who remain. Wearing a Metallica T-shirt, walking slowly, with a calm gaze, he is not a hermit, but a man who has chosen solitude as a matter of consistency. For years he worked as a porter, living in a warehouse and waking up at dawn. In 2015, he decided to leave everything behind. He found refuge in Rocca San Casciano, in the Apennines, an hour’s drive along winding roads from Forlì. 

It may be only three hectares, but Gianni treats it like a sacred garden. Hundreds of trees of ancient varieties, protected using traditional methods, such as bottles filled with beer hung from the branches to attract and stun hornets. A small but loyal clientele supports his work, attracted by his radical vision: “My fruit is not just zero kilometre, but zero day. You receive it on the same day I pick it.” 

Gianni gradually built up his business, and things were beginning to take off until the flood hit in 2023. Non-stop rain, landslides, streams bursting their banks. For two weeks, he couldn’t even get out to the field. When he was finally able to reach it, there was nothing left: his little Eden was buried in mud. But he didn’t give up: using his hands and a wheelbarrow, he replanted and rebuilt. Two years later, the trees are slowly starting to bloom again. But around him, the hills are emptying. Houses are closing, fields are being abandoned, friends are leaving. After the flood, a colleague from a nearby farm gave up everything and started working as a street cleaner. Gianni persevered, but he did so alone. 

The state provided no assistance: no compensation, no reimbursement. He received nothing from AgriCat, the national mutual fund created to compensate farmers affected by catastrophes. Satellites detected no standing water on his sloping land and rejected his request, as if there had been no flood. Gianni could only rebuild thanks to donations from his most loyal customers. And what about Europe? “Yeah,” he says with a bitter smile. “I get 1200 euros a year from the CAP. Plus 128 euros in compensation.” 

The paradox is striking. Gianni conserves biodiversity, supports a territory, and propagates agricultural knowledge that is at risk of extinction, and yet he receives a paltry sum from the Common Agricultural Policy. This is a concrete example of what Professor Franco Sotte had told me: the CAP has become a mechanism that rewards land area rather than values. It favours those with large areas of land and penalises those who work on a few hectares and produce quality products. 

Gianni is the living embodiment of a stronghold, one that holds firm against landslides, market pressures, and the indifference of institutions. Through stubborn determination, one farmer shows just how fragile – yet vital – the agriculture sidelined by the CAP truly is. 

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced in Brussels a 20 per cent reduction in overall funding for the CAP for 2028-2034. There is also the intention to give national governments more leeway to decide on the disbursement of funds.

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. There is talk of reducing it by 20 per cent, and having national governments manage it. “This would be a disaster,” Sotte explains. “We would have 27 different agricultural systems competing with each other. But there’s no doubt the CAP needs reform, and the current model isn’t working. It’s crumbling due to its inability to keep up with the times and the inadequacy of the institutions and organisations tasked with implementing it.” 

The CAP, with its 386.6 billion euros for the 2021-2027 period, represents 29 per cent of the European budget. But the distribution of subsidies is highly unfair: 20 per cent of beneficiaries currently receive 80 per cent of the contributions. Those with more land receive more funds. This encourages land concentration, with large farms swallowing up small ones. Across Europe, and in Italy too. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics, the number of agricultural holdings in Italy halved from 2000 to 2020. 

As Brussels debates the future of European agriculture, the Po Valley remains immense yet weary. On the surface, it may appear eternal, but inside it bears the marks of disease: farms closing, orchards swept away by water, the desertion of the surrounding hills. Yet, amidst this wounded landscape, there are still men and women who resist: Giuseppe with his flooded fields sown as they were in the old days; Maria defending the memory of her submerged orchard; Gianni rebuilding his hill piece by piece. 

They make no fuss, they have no lobbies, they have no electoral influence; but they show that another kind of agriculture is possible, with the right support. But without an adequate political framework, these are likely to remain isolated stories. 

“We are hearing the last warning cry of a farming culture that is dying out,” says agronomist Duccio Caccioni. For Caccioni, the crisis is not cyclical, but systemic: “A change of direction is essential, otherwise the loss will be twofold: cultural and environmental wealth on the one hand, and our food sovereignty on the other.” 

So the question remains: will the CAP of the future open its eyes to this crisis and change course, or will it continue to support a model that risks engulfing itself?  

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the third article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale. 

 Translated by Ciaran Lawless | Voxeurop