In addition to technology, the earth needs a generational change
Companies led by under-35s are on average more productive - up to twice the national average - and more innovation-oriented
5' min read
5' min read
While there is increasing talk of 5.0 technologies in agriculture - as if to overtake 2.0 and 4.0 at a stroke - there is still no solution to a much more urgent and structural problem: the absence of young people. In fact, the hyper-technological future of agriculture is in danger of crashing against a reality that speaks of increasingly old farms, neglected land and a generational turnover that is unable to take off.
The numbers are clear. In Italy, according to Crea data and the most recent Coldiretti analyses, more than 45% of farms are managed by people over 65. Only 9% is in the hands of young people under 40. And if something does not change quickly, in the short term over 2.5 million hectares of agricultural land could remain without a tenant, in the medium term this figure could increase dramatically. This is not only an enormous economic loss, but also a deep wound to Italy's territories, landscape, biodiversity and food culture.
In the last twenty years, our country has lost about 2.7 million hectares of cultivated land: an area the size of Lombardy that, piece by piece, has been abandoned. Not only mountains and marginal hills, but also fertile areas of the plains. A silent loss, which goes hand in hand with the ageing of farmers and the lack of attraction for new generations.
But why do young people not want (or fail) to do agriculture?
One could dismiss the question with a boomerish 'young people do not want to work', but this is not really the case, there are objective constraints. Firstly, there is a problem of access to land: agricultural land costs money, and it is often fragmented into small plots that make it difficult to use efficiently. Added to this is a difficult access to credit: the constraints imposed on banks in granting credit require guarantees that young people often do not have. Bureaucracy also does not help: between permits, calls for tenders and contributions to chase after, starting an agricultural enterprise can become an obstacle course. There is also the issue of training: many young people who approach agriculture do so without adequate support or educational courses that are truly in line with the needs of a sector that today requires managerial, digital and environmental skills. Then there are the children of farmers, those who have the land but have taken other paths because from birth they have been told that the land is even lower than they say. It happened in the families of small producers who struggled to make ends meet, but it also happened in the families with large farms whose children ended up studying at the best private universities in Milan or abroad.
