Looking Back to the Future: Historical Polycultures in Central Italy
The current level of environmental degradation caused directly by conventional agriculture has reached a critical level: this is a point which even skeptical critics see as a zenith if humanity is to continue to inhabit the planet along with other species. Much of the current effort in problem-solving looks forwards toward twenty-second century solutions; it is possible though that the way forward is to be found by looking back.
The hills of central Italy, of Tuscany and Umbria, are larger proportionally than their actual geographical surface area in the mental geography of the average Westerner. The modern visitor feels transported back through the centuries: indeed, it’s easy to frame a photograph without power lines or automobiles and imagine it a color representation of what the Tuscan countryside would have looked like in Leonardo Da Vinci’s day. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What we today consider a timeless Italian rural landscape–the vineyard whose neat rows trace the curves of a Tuscan hill, or the waves of grain that run across the Tiber River valley–are anything but ageless. Indeed, they are an extremely recent invention. This landscape, however picturesque, is ultimately made up of monocultures and as such is completely ahistorical. The Tuscan—and all of central Italian—countryside was in fact until relatively recently a dense web of polycultures. Predominant until the late 1960s was a type of agriculture referred to as the coltura mista or, more commonly, the coltura promiscua (“promiscuous” in the Italian sense of “not limited to one [type]”). In English this system can be referred to as “polycultural agriculture” or even better “mixed farming.”
Instead of strict monocultural plots (e.g. vineyards with just vines) or occasional companion plantings, there were “fields” marked by a highly-developed mix of species. In these mixed fields, farmers (or more specifically, sharecroppers) squeezed the maximum production out of the minimum of space not through extensive planting, but rather intensive planting. Because they could not, with their limited manpower and finances, purchase or agree to sharecrop larger fields, they intensified production on those that they tended. This meant primarily using as much of the field as possible, i.e. going vertical, or as the old sharcreroppers themselves said to the French agricultural researcher Henri Desplanques in the early 1960s, they could cultivate sotto e sopra (“below and above”).
Fields were thinly planted with “support trees” up which grapevines were trained. The species of tree differed depending on the secondary functions it was to serve. If the tree was primarily for support and for fuel, the most common species was the Field Maple (Acer campestre). Where the terrain was more hydric, poplars or even willows were used to keep the roots of the other plants dry. Often, though, elms were planted: in addition to providing support, their leaves could be gathered as forage for the sharecroppers’ animals, obviating the need to grow oats or hay. The trees in mixed farming were planted sparsely so as not to shade the crops planted below, but were enough in number to supply fuel in the form of cuttings from the yearly coppicing (or, more accurately, pollarding). In between these rows of support trees and grapevines sharecroppers planted both grain crops and legumes, the latter of which provided nitrogen fixation and improved soil fertility.
The reasons behind the popularity of this type of polyculture were myriad. Though we often think in modern times of river valleys as being ideal for agricultural, the scourge of malaria kept Italian farmers up on the foothills. These peasants did not know about mosquitos being the vectors of a protozoan parasite, but they knew enough to stay away from stagnant water and its “bad air” (mal’aria in Italian). If malaria weren’t enough to chase farmers up out of the flatland, overpopulation was. Talking about the intentional cultivation by the Fascist regime of the “Umbria, green heart of Italy” identity, historian Valeria Ventura suggests that the ubiquity of agriculture was necessary, not “natural.” The extension of cultivation into relatively marginal areas (the sides of the Umbrian Apennines) was a testament not to the region’s fertility, but rather to a “long, slow, tenacious centuries-old struggle to win land to cultivate from the swamps and forests.” Desplanques describes this polyculture as a necessary solution in a mountainous region like Umbria, where the only lands left in late medieval times were the hillsides and meadows at high altitude. The great historian of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel, noted that “for coltura mista, the combination of orchard, market garden and sometimes sown fields, is often localized at the level of the foothills.” By definition, though, these inclined agricultural spaces were less suited to ploughed fields. The thin soils of central Italy had to be protected, and a low-disturbance regime was ideally suited to hilltop agriculture.
Mixed farming was also a result of the predominant economic relationship after the 1300s, sharecropping. Sharecropping was “inconceivable without polyculture.” The property owner was always interested in tying the sharecropper to the land he worked, but could not do so unless there was a more or less stable means of sustenance, something that the inherent redundancy of mixed farming could provide. A drought might kill off winter wheat but hardier olives and grapes would survive, and farm animals could always be fed on a combination of leaf-forage and other forage gathered from the woods. The polyculture did not end strictly at the confines of the field, as rural Italians had (and continue to have) intimate knowledge of wild edibles. The forest was simply a less-ordered part of the coltura promiscua. Indeed the city of Norcia, high in the Apennines, is famous for its pork products; the pigs which were their ultimate source were fed not with grain but rather “pastured” in the oak forests around the city.
Another advantage of this system was its resistance to disease. The history of phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae), a bug that attacks the roots of European grapevines, seems a universal one, in that it quickly spread and destroyed huge swaths of vineyards starting in the mid-1800s. The pest had a particularly late arrival in central Italy, especially in Umbria. Phylloxera was first noticed in Perugia in 1891, then reached the nearby city of Gubbio by 1899, but did not spread further. It reappeared in 1916 on the shores of Lago Trasimeno and only in 1933 reached Perugia again, as well as Foligno and Montefalco. Why the late arrival and slow spread? The reason was the “backwardness” of Umbrian agriculture, in other words it use of the coltura promiscua. The roots of the grapevines in this system were stronger than those closely-spaced vines in monoculture vineyards, and their distance from each other made transmission less likely. Even as late as the mid-1960s many of Umbria’s grapevines had not yet been attacked by phylloxera.
Most shocking about the traditional polyculture was how long it lasted. In 1955, for vineyards, there were 126,550 hectares that were a mix of grain, vines, and trees, and only 1,520 hectares of what Desplanques refers to as “specialized vineyards” (i.e. monocultures of vines , what we think of when we hear the word “vineyard”). Over 98.8% of vineyards were mixed: “Vineyards were everywhere, but just vines were rare.” Similar numbers are available for other parts of central Italy, as Tuscan and papal records show.
This system could only last as long as there was not mechanization in Umbria. Desplanques notes that “there was a duel to the death between [the tractor] and the tree .” Mixed fields could not be harvested with machines, which were ever-more widespread after the second World War. Leguminous forage (e.g. alfalfa), industrial varieties, and chemical fertilizers were other reasons for this system’s rapid disappearance. Another is the end of sharecropping in the mid-1960s: the disappearance of the manpower and skilled labor needed to keep polyculture going coincided with the flight of rural people to the cities for better pay and the ease with which tractors could cultivate extensive fields. Intensive systems like mixed farming were no longer efficient or economical. Desplanques, writing in June of 1966, affirms that, “in the valleys only 30% of the surface area [of the fields] is still mixed with trees. The fields where ten years ago the polyculture reigned, today have been transformed into open fields. [...] How much longer can this polyculture persist?”
This essay focuses on the system of mixed farming in central Italy in the late medieval and modern period, but there is ample evidence that mixed farming was used elsewhere as well. Tom Standage notes a graphic representation of the vine-tree planting in the funeral relief that represents the coronation of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II in 870 B.C.E. Despite its widespread use and its deep historical roots, the only remnants in Italy of this centuries-old system are in the small plots that run along railroad lines, or that old farmers have planted near their houses. One wonders if the new wave of interest in edible forest gardening will resuscitate interest in a solution that does not have be discovered, only rediscovered.
“La vite, invecchiata sopra l'albero vecchio, cadde insieme con la ruina d'esso albero, e fu per la trista compagnia a mancare insieme con quello.”
[The vine, grown old on a tree, falls together on the ruin of this tree, and because of the sad company the vine kept, it disappears along with the tree.]
--Aphorisms of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 –1519)
Zachary Nowak is a professor of food studies at the Umbra Institute, an American university program in Perugia, Italy. Contact him at znowak@umbra-institute.com.
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"Looking Back to the Future: Historical Polycultures in Central Italy” in Agroforestry News, Vol.19 n.4. Dartington, UK: Agroforestry Research Trust, 2011.
