Value your land and make it self-sufficient
A few years ago, I read a book published by Macro Edizioni entitled Un istante dopo. The author tells the story of an American town which, following a catastrophe, puts all electronic control units out of use due to a reversal of the magnetic poles. Consequently, any electronic equipment, in an instant, ceases to function.
After reading this book, it became really clear to me how much we depend on electricity and electronics for everything. Without control units cars don’t work, transport stops, hospitals close, shops empty and very soon the life of most people becomes a nightmare. According to the book’s author, a year without electricity would exterminate 70% of the Western population.
Today we travel in a car produced in Japan and fuelled by fuel that comes from Saudi Arabia, we eat food that comes from Argentina, we dress in clothes produced in China, we heat ourselves with gas coming from Russia, we furnish our house with Swedish furniture, we make our purchases online from an American site, we entrust our savings to a Dutch bank and so on. Any product we consume travels far and wide across the planet. The result of this way of living is that we are tremendously dependent on an economy over which we have no control and often not even minimal awareness.
In addition to creating enormous damage with the pollution of land, air, water, with the destruction of entire communities and with the exploitation of low-cost and child labour, we become increasingly fragile. Our life depends on international economic relations and the choices of large corporations: we are no longer able to live without them. We don’t know how to cultivate, we don’t know how to heat ourselves, we don’t know how to produce energy, we don’t know how to build our house. Often we only know how to tap our fingers on a computer device, this too an object of exploitation, in Africa for raw materials and in Asia for assembly.
We can continue to be dependent on large international economic groups and consequently be subservient to their choices or choose to be creators of our own life and our own world: to be self-sufficient.
This is one of the main reasons that led me to found “Autosufficienza Farm” in 2009. I don’t like a world of consumer subjects in favour of a few international predatory groups. I don’t like my country becoming increasingly poor in favour of very few rich people. I don’t like the natural paradise – our mother Earth – continuing to be abused and exploited for the insane interest of a few rich people.
I think that today there is sufficient knowledge to create a new era where man returns to being a guardian of Nature as has always happened for native peoples and for this to happen it’s necessary to spread concrete examples.
Self-sufficiency and health
Before anything else, it’s necessary to be self-sufficient in health. Scientific medicine, namely that which protects the interests of the large international pharmaceutical companies, is a continuous failure as regards health. It manages to keep sick people alive for a long time and is very skilled at managing the symptoms of a disease: all this to the detriment of health. Today much data confirms that scientific medicine is the main cause of illness. Health, either exists or doesn’t exist, and if we continuously depend on medicines and doctors it means we are not in health and we are not self-sufficient. How would we manage without a doctor and without medicines? If our health depends on a pill, we already know we are not very resilient. From one day to the next, for infinite reasons, that pill might no longer be available.
Being born at home, being breastfed, not being vaccinated and not using medicines means being self-sufficient and often also means being healthy. My doctor has seen me twice in the last 15 years: once I asked for a sports medical certificate necessary to run a marathon, the other time I needed him to confirm my mental stability, to be able to handle weapons. Living on the farm surrounded by green mountains, eating healthy food and drinking spring water, is the way my parents had me born and raised and this allows me, even today, to be self-sufficient and healthy.
Self-sufficiency and water
Another fundamental aspect is water! Without pure water we’re done for. Despite the referendum against the privatisation of water, most of us pay a bill to a private company and often water reaches us via electric pumps which could stop working. That’s why I chose to found Autosufficienza Farm in a place where spring water is self-managed and reaches buildings by gravity. Pure water in the years to come will be an increasingly rare resource because we continue to pollute it in every possible way. Having access to a spring of pure water is a luxury already today and tomorrow it will be even more so.
Self-sufficiency and food
When we are self-sufficient for our health and for water, it’s necessary to think about food. It’s madness from all points of view to have food arrive from other parts of the planet. In Italy less and less food is produced. From 1930 to today, the surface of woods in hills and mountains has tripled and the plain has been covered with concrete and asphalt.
For almost thirty years the productivity of land has not increased: this means that large quantities of very poor quality food reach us from all parts of the world and in particular from places where one can pollute without limits and exploit labour. Food that in the past was considered medicine, today has instead become a cause of illness, thanks also to the manipulation of the food industry.
On the farm we therefore try to self-produce everything possible: ancient grains, legumes, vegetables of all kinds, berries. Fruit and eggs are produced without any use of chemical fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides or other filth commonly used in conventional agriculture. In this way we don’t pollute when we cultivate, we don’t pollute when we transport and we treat ourselves whilst eating healthy food just harvested and of the highest quality.
Self-sufficiency and energy
The energy aspect is also fundamental. Today for energy in Italy we depend on Saudi Arabian oil, French nuclear power and Russian gas. Our money would have been enough, used instead by the government to save private banks, to convert our entire energy infrastructure to renewables. In addition to depending on abroad for our energy, we are also very skilled at wasting it. Today there is the knowledge to make houses that don’t consume energy, whilst instead we continue to build and renovate buildings that are totally ineffective in terms of energy consumption.
On the farm we have renovated respecting class A criteria, using only natural materials, maintaining the historical-landscape constraint. Thanks to a super-efficient wood boiler, solar panels and microcapillary heating system, we use only a little wood from our forest to heat the buildings.
For electricity, at the moment we turn to a company that guarantees only energy produced from renewable sources but we are about to make ourselves self-sufficient through a photovoltaic system and a micro-hydroelectric plant.
Self-sufficiency and even more…
Self-sufficiency can also be education, sociality, entertainment, culture etc. It must not and cannot be self-sufficiency only of a single person and nor can it be lived in an extreme way. I have never met anyone 100% self-sufficient, in everything, and I don’t even think it’s possible. Like happiness, self-sufficiency too must be a striving, a moving towards. Just being self-sufficient as a region would be a great result and to do it would be very simple. How to do it? Buy only Romagnolo products and services, mate!
Francesco Angelo Rosso
