To kickstart the shift to my next agritech development and to do some research for my next book I took myself on an Unsettled retreat package to Podere San Georgio in the Tuscan hills near Pisa.
The Podere (or small farm) is an ancient former convent long ago converted into basic hotel accommodation and focused on providing high quality fresh cooked food from the locality. The local producers are all selected for using organic and biodynamic methods of production. Nothing comes out of packets from a food service facility, the wines and beer come from local producers too small to be available outside the area. The Podere has 500 olive trees of its own and lies on the via del vino so vineyards are all around. The sandy soil is an upraised seabed and fossilised sea shells are found in some layers. This soil provides the minerals for the tasty local wines and is ideal for olive tree production.
The landscape is very hilly and wildly forested, the steep slopes and cliffs being too difficult for monocultural forestry so the air is clean. Birdsong is audible most of the day. Unsettled had brought together a diverse group of fourteen single visitors mostly mid-career professionals from around the world with about half being from the USA and Canada, I was the only European in the EMEA half of the group. This lent itself to great cultural interactions with nightly get togethers for dining and dancing under the moon.
Unsettled laid on visits to wineries, cheesemakers and a highlight for me being a truffle farm where we saw dogs hunt out truffles that we later cooked with homemade pasta.
In the evenings beside tasting the local wines and eating the excellent ad hoc meals provided, we had hands on demonstrations of pasta and pizza making. The chef Alessio specialises in using offcuts and seasonal vegetables and this being autumn there was plenty of variety.
Clearly the fertile soil of Tuscany and the local food traditions lend themselves to a high degree of self sufficiency which has to become a regional objective as we move away from the energy demands of long distance supply chains. I believe that this philosophy will allow us to stop relying on long shelf life processed food which has affected human health with outcomes such as obesity, auto-immune disorders and food fads. Any future farm I get into will include retail sales and maybe a cooked food service to add value to the offering.