An Overview Of Our Solution
Land degradation represents a global threat for biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services. Furthermore, land abandonment in rural areas affects a substantial part of the world. We try to invert this trend with TERRE COLTE association, providing economic opportunities for financially struggled farmers, relying on shared farming and crowdfunding approaches, in order to produce sustainable food, re-introduce abandoned crop and vegetables varieties, restore landscape promoting biodiversity. In 4 years, we associated six farms and we are currently supplying the food demand of 2000 families. We aim to reach the goal of supplying food for 5000 families over the next three years, as well as providing stable income for new landowners, and recovering other patches of degraded land and related landscape.
Who is this solution impacting?
Community Type
Urban
Suburban
Rural
Additional Information
- Population Impacted:
- Continent: Europe
General Information
Organization type
Nirlaba
Ecosystem (select all that apply)
Forests
Grasslands
Urban/Built Environment
Population impacted
6,000 people
Challenge
Size of agricultural area
25 ha
Production quantity
8,000 kg of grain, 3000 kg of chickpeas, 12,000 kg of seasonal fruits and vegetables
People employed
50 people
Solution
Describe your solution
The Association promotes its activities in three areas:
1-Recovery of lands functionality/sustainable food production
2-Restoration of biodiversity (landscape corridors/meadows) (planned)
3-Creation of food forests (planned)
1-Shared Gardens: Purchasing/borrowing abandoned agricultural lands from associate farmers to create 50 square meters lots, rented to users at 1€/day for growing vegetables. Organisation of farming practices workshops. Membership fee of 6€/year to sustain activities, including training, lands purchases, and retribution for associated farmers.
Flour of your lot: Relying on a crowdfunding scheme, we ensure farmers the initial capital to sustain their costs. In return, 60% of their yields goes to the funders. The money from the crowdfunding, besides paying landowners, is allocated to the purchase of stone mills to further reduce costs, increasing quality.
2-Most of Sardinia’s vegetation cover in rural areas has been lost due to overgrazing and agriculture. The association aims to restore native vegetation patches connectivity over the landscape, creating wildlife corridors with native Mediterranean shrub species along the borders of the farmlands it manages.
3-We plan to create forest gardening areas, to diversify and maximise production, ensuring constant food yields over time. This will mimic a forest succession that locally will boost wildlife biodiversity. Meadows will be also created in order to improve pollinators and insects’ biodiversity.
Implementation
Describe your implementation
Starting from 3000 square meter, we incentivized self-food production renting 50 square meters lots to common citizens, at the cost of 1€/day. Over 3 years, we created a consortium of 6 farms, offering the landowners the opportunity to not abandon their lands, but to generate an income through this “shared gardens” approach. The proximity of farms to urban areas (<10 km) reduces costs of transportation and emissions from organic fuel combustion. Through the purchasing of 60,000 square meters land, we implemented the initiative “Flour of your lot”, in which private users provide the initial capital for farmers in return of a part of the yield after the harvest. The purchase of a stone mill allowed the production of high quality flour, shared according users’ quantity demands.
For pollinators and insects biodiversity restoration, waiting to implement our wildlife corridors network strategy, we are planting aromatic Mediterranean shrubs along the borders of our farmlands as well as creating areas of meadows.
During the first years of our association, we studied the necessities of people coming to us looking for a piece of arable land. We therefore built a model, which could fit a broad target of users. The vast majority of people entering our association are aware of the necessity to promote changes in their lives, especially in their feeding habits (banning all the foods coming from non-organic productions).
The key success factors are represented by a relatively low cost of shared gardens for users, by strengthening family bonds through recreational agriculture, the continuous advice provision from our experts to our user members, the collaboration with farmers, proximity of farms to urbanised areas, biological processes ensured at every stage.
The biggest threats are represented by large industrial groups, which attempt to gain monopoly on seeds, criminalising small independent farms growing autochthonous crop varieties, even relying on legal expedients.
External connections
The commitment of Terre Colte Association for the recovery of degraded and abandoned agricultural lands has led to a series of interactions, which initially were not expected. In 2014, together with some humanitarian associations, we elaborated a project for the involvement in our farming activities of immigrants, waiting for a residence permit, and local unemployed people. We allocated 5000 square meters to this projects, allowing interactions between the two groups, which ultimately will benefit cultural exchanges and prejudices barriers abetment. In many cases, we offered our gardens to solidarity associations caring for the disabled and for people with psychiatric disorders.
Together with the Ministry of Justice, we signed an agreement for the social rehabilitation of people awaiting trials and/or already condemned, who opted for alternative sentencing.
Results
What is the environmental or ecological challenge you are targeting with your solution?
Inappropriate agricultural practices, overgrazing and deforestation are among the primary causes of land degradation, a hot topic in many political agendas. Land degradation, including physical-chemical features, erosion, or vegetation loss, has been widely recognized as a key process leading to decreased biodiversity at various levels, starting from a reduced content of organic matter, which ultimately affect the whole network of interactions among soil microorganisms. Moreover, the carbon sequestration potential of the soil also decreases, contributing to climate change. These phenomena lead to reduced ecosystem services provision, diminishing soil productivity and affecting people’s livelihoods.
Describe the context in which you are operating
Nowadays, land abandonment in Sardinia is a severe social phenomenon, exacerbated by the lack of a wide economic market because of a limited population, by the high transportation costs determined by an insularity condition and by depopulation in rural areas. These factors, together with absence of proper infrastructures and lack of farmers’ initiatives, diminish the competitiveness of organic products, whose generated profits do not counterbalance the costs of production. For this reason, many are left with the only option to abandon agricultural lands or to convert them into pastures. For those who continue to farm, the alternative is relying on chemical fertilizers and herbicides in order to increase yields. In a territory in which the unemployment rate is about 20%, a slow recover of abandoned lands and the adoption of sustainable farming practices may offer job opportunities, whilst also contributing to diversification of production and biodiversity restoration.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Besides allowing regeneration of biochemical interactions among microorganisms, recovering soil production potentiality and increasing soil layer biodiversity, we are creating meadows and fences using aromatic Mediterranean shrubs along the border of the farms and along the borders of the shared gardens. We are planting now rosemary, sage, lavender, thyme, mastic tree, myrtle, lemon grass, and nasturtium and marigold flowers. This has allowed insects and especially pollinators’ biodiversity to increase substantially, benefitting local honey producers. The creation of the wildlife corridors network together with the forest gardens patches, will allow colonization from birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians, significantly enhancing locally availability of habitats for wildlife, which can experience a recover in number. The goal is to create a broad landscape connecting our scattered farmlands to ensure stable provision of ecosystem services and perennial habitat for wildlife.
Water
500 characters max.
Food Security/Nutrition
Each land lot in our six associated farms ensures approximately 40/50 kg of organic products per month. Our goals for the next three years are creating at least 4,000 50-square-meters lots, producing over 1000 tons of sustainable products per year, involving at least 5000 associates. The creation of food forests will improve the shared garden initiative, ensuring a constant yield of organic low cost food, with no environmental impact.
Economic/Sustainable Development
The recovery of abandoned agricultural lands, farmed through the shared garden approach and in the future implemented through the forest gardening, has provided landowners an income strategy, which can contrast the depopulation trend in rural areas and provide new jobs for unemployed people, willing to invest a small initial sum. Our plan of creating a network of stone mills, covering each 50 km2 radius, will supply the demand at a microscale and allow small traditional farms to persist.
Climate
500 characters max.
Sustainability
We rely on an annual fee contribution from our 800 members, distributed over 6 associated farms. We also generate income through direct selling of products (vegetables, fruits, honey), farming workshops and courses, and consultancy for agricultural initiatives and/or recover of abandoned lands.
Return on investment
The initial cost has been €1000, 1 ha of land on free loan, volunteer work by the 3 founders. Work-group was the key to expand the activities, acquire members, rent the land lots, and involve other landowners as associates. This has been done through the “Shared Gardens” initiative. The scheme replies and multiply itself. For every new farm entering our association, the number of members and the income from fees increase. This allows expansion in new areas of activity, starting from grain fields as in “Flour of your lot” initiative (approximately 12,000 €, including production, farmer stipend, stone mills, and administration costs, supported through crowdfunding), and in the future recovering vineyards and olive groves.
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Replication and Scale
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Replicability is already the pillar of Terre Colte. We constitute operative locations in different urban areas following an already experimented scheme. We build a social farming franchising, providing advice for landowners willing to initiate a shared garden, providing legal advice, space planning and management consultancy. Key factors for development are communication at local and national levels, as well as the involvement of specialized professional figures whit expertise in agricultural science, law, landscape planning, ecology, preferably young graduates.