Why Young Italians Are Leaving Cities To Start A New Life As Farmers In The Countryside

For some Italians, the future of work looks like the past

Italy industrialized after World War II, and never really looked back. But the virus has drastically reordered society and economies, locking seasonal workers in their home countries while marooning Italians who worked in retail, entertainment, fashion and other once-mighty industries.

Where until recently a return to the land seemed reserved for natural wine hipsters or gentry sowing boutique gardens with ancient seeds, more Italians are now considering the work of their grandparents as laborers on the large farms that are increasingly essential to feed a paralyzed country and continent.

Without them, hundreds of tons of broccoli, fava beans, fruit and vegetables are in danger of withering on the vine or rotting on the ground.

“The virus has forced us to rethink the models of development and the way the country works,” Teresa Bellanova, Italy’s agricultural minister, who is herself a former farmhand, said.

She said that the virus required Italy, which has remained at the vanguard of the epidemic and its consequences in Europe, to confront “a scarcity of food for many levels of the population,” including unemployed young professionals, and that agriculture needed to be “where the new generations can find a future.”

Italy has witnessed an important counterflow that has brought young, educated, and metropolitan folks back to the countryside. Many Italians under 35 years old have decided to return to rural areas to take up both a business and a lifestyle in agriculture-related fields. Soon the Mediterranean country has become the one with the highest number of youths employed in this sector in Europe. According to ISMEA, the National Institute for Agricultural and Food Market Services), the number of young people moving to the countryside and starting a career around farming has been growing incessantly through the last decade.

The food trend and the consumers’ preference for organic, bio, at zero km and artisanal food, is enhancing the small agribusinesses that the younger generations have engaged into. The field has been granting stability and turnover while the ones requiring higher skills could not do the same, and it is now making a profit out of the renewed attention to the idea of growing, trading and eating food locally. Buying directly from the farmer entails an added value to the product, which is why local markets have become crowded commercial areas that prove the benefits of a truly circular economy.

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