Deep Roots

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Family farming means food

born from relationships

Carlo Petrini, President, Slow Food and Cinzia Scaffidi, Director, Slow Food Study Center

arm is a place. It is important to start from the

origin of the words. When we think of a farm we

think about place, people and activities. Family

is people. And again, when we think of a family we

think about people, places and activities. This is the

core issue of the idea of family farming: it is a complex

food system, based on relationships.

The key word is ‘adaptability’, which presumes another:

‘unpredictability’. We know unpredictability as one of the

features characterizing living things. Certainly science

makes a major effort to reduce unpredictability. But it can

only be a reduction, not an elimination. Where it is not

possible to totally eliminate unpredictability, we need to

have recourse to the amazing instrument of adaptability.

This certainty – the fact that nature is not totally predicta-

ble and controllable – has always been an underlying element

of all forms of traditional agriculture. Thanks to their small

scale, they are more flexible, more reactive and better able to

tolerate unpredictability. These kinds of agriculture actually

learn from the idea of a family management and vice versa.

Living individuals (whether humans, vegetables, animals or

microorganisms) that happen to be in the same time and space

can hope to survive only through the relationships among

them, which means adapting to each other, co-evolving.

However, it is not only a structural question, it is also a

matter of objectives: the objective of small-scale agriculture is

to ensure the producer and family have a harvest every year,

whatever the climatic conditions. Here we can see a basic

difference between traditional and industrial agriculture,

since the fundamental element for the latter is number, in

the grammatical sense of the word. So, we can analyse indus-

trial agriculture and define it as singular, and we can examine

traditional agriculture and define it as plural.

Image: IFAD

Family farming is a complex food system, based on relationships

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