Learning from Agricultural Heritage? Lessons of Sustainability from Italian “Coltura Promiscua”

Viviana Ferrario

doi:10.3390/su13168879

Abstract

Agricultural heritage is gaining increasing importance as a repository of lessons to be learned for more sustainable agriculture in the future. Among the forgotten European agricultural heritage, the Italian grapevine “coltura promiscua,” which integrates agroforestry and intercropping, survives only in a few regions in the form of relics. Based on geographic, historic, agricultural literature published on the subject between 16th and 20th century with a focus on North eastern Italy, on previous fieldwork research, and on the analysis of recent candidacies to the Italian National register, this contribution identifies five principles that can be considered today as lessons of sustainability in agriculture: vertical intensification, spatial multifunctionality, resilience through crop diversity, labour-intensive production, personal/familiar/community attachment. Taken together, these principles describe a new rationality that seems to adapt to changed global and local conditions and can suggest new strategies to design new sustainable agricultural systems. The research suggests that sustainability principles can be found both by studying relics of agriculture heritage, and by carefully reading the literature that described them in the past, well before the concept of sustainability itself appeared in the scientific debate. Finally, this paper highlights some difficulties in practicing these lessons in modern agroforestry systems and suggests directions for future research.

Highlights

In recent years, agricultural heritage has often been presented as a repository of lessons to be learned for more sustainable agriculture for the future
The aim of this paper is to present the forgotten agricultural heritage of Italian “coltura promiscua”, and focus on which sustainability principles can be learned from it
(among others: [34,35,36,37]) and the main travel literature belonging to the Grand Tour tradition; (2) books and scientific articles published between the 1960s and 1970s—that is, in the fall phase [39,40,41,42,43,44,45]; (3) the most recent scientific literature that has rediscovered coltura promiscua as a traditional landscape in Europe [5,23,46]

Summary

Introduction

Agricultural heritage has often been presented as a repository of lessons to be learned for more sustainable agriculture for the future. Traditional rural landscape defined as those “with a long history, which evolved slowly and where it took centuries to form a characteristic structure reflecting a harmonious integration of abiotic, biotic and cultural elements” [4] Began to be taken as an example of multifunctionality [5] and sustainability [4] as opposed to the industrial agricultural landscapes of modernity. The notion of traditional agricultural landscape—elsewhere “historical agricultural landscape” as in the first important inventory in Italy [6]—is not necessarily linked with history, but, as recently observed, helps to deal with intensive and omnipresent modern landscape changes [7].

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