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It is a cold but sunny morning in the Paraje El Gallo, about 20 kilometers from the city of Tandil, in the center-east of the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). In his country house, Damián Colucci warms himself with a wood stove. He drinks and offers bitter mate. He wears a beret and answers the questions calmly, kneading them.
Every so often, he looks out the window at the horizon: he sees a field of pure land, ready to be worked. Then he proudly shows off his pumpkins, his potatoes and, mainly, the flour that he grinds from the organic cereals he produces. He has been producing agroecologically for over 20 years in a region that mostly follows another path: that of crops with a high load of inputs and agrotoxins, with the consequent soil erosion and contamination. “Now, life in the countryside is not easy. Now the countryside is agroindustry,” he sums up.
Colucci bought this 64-hectare farm in 2000, four years after Argentina approved the use of genetically modified seeds and agrochemicals. The house he is in did not exist, nor did the field ready for planting or the trees. In those years, he was a “freak”; so much so that the neighbors wondered why a 20-year-old boy had decided to leave the city to go to the countryside.
“Things have changed now, but here they were very conservative. At first, they said I had done something very bad and that is why my family decided to keep me locked up in the countryside,” he recalls with a smile.
At first, the idea was just to live off the land. “I found a very fertile land. The first thing I did was to plant my food. I couldn’t live in the country without doing so! I started with a vegetable garden and after a few months I planted wheat. I chose long-cycle varieties. I started with cereals and I didn’t stop,” he says.
Currently, Colucci produces about 20,000 kilos of wheat flour, rye and wheat bran per month under his Monte Callado brand, which he grinds in his granite stone mill. “Stone milling is different from conventional milling. The grain does not lose its aromas and the flour comes out with a great perfume; in short, it is the flour that humanity has eaten for thousands of years. What we eat now is new to humans: something white, ultra-refined and industrially ground.”
He started selling his flour on a very small scale, mainly to families interested in making bread and pizzas with organic flour. Today his product is highly valued by pasta factories, restaurants and natural stores. He also grinds grains from other producers, who want to make their own flour. He even started sharing his flour with his friends. know-how in the annual course called Self-sufficient life in the humid pampas: How to produce, process and preserve food.
“I knew the dangers of agrochemicals and it never crossed my mind to use them. From the first day I started in an agroecological way, although in those years that word did not exist. Of course, I did not do well from the beginning. I realized that my forte had to be wheat farming. The most noble thing I can do is produce food that I can process and that people can eat,” says Colucci, who became a reference in the area.
His work and vision go against the current of the productive paradigm that predominates in Tandil and the rest of Argentina. From the 1990s onwards, chemical synthesis products, direct seeding and transgenic materials became established. The “profitability” of the model is based on an abuse of pesticides and the risks that this entails, such as contamination of food, water surfaces and land.
“The promotion of direct seeding was a big lie to producers. They were deceived and entered into a system from which they cannot – or do not want – to escape. They were invited to conferences where they said it was an ecological sowing, in which they were going to use less and less fertilizers and herbicides. But it happened the other way around: more and more agrochemicals are needed. Producers assume that they are making a mess, but they say that there is no way out. They want a constant and even return all the time. If you think like that, forget about the system that I use,” he says.
Colucci’s concern is also that of other producers, who are looking for a production system with a more sustainable outlook. Marcelo Miguens, an agricultural engineer and specialist in agroecology, advises farms seeking a transition to this model. “Production systems are being reviewed; due to a demand from the producers themselves, there is a rethinking of the productivist vision. And the debate is opening up about the direction that agriculture should follow. The traditional system carries a large load of chemicals, contamination and loss of organic matter, in addition to many ‘externalities’, such as abandoned fields,” he explains.
Miguens believes that there should be no conflict between one production system and another. “The idea is to produce information to know that there are other ways of producing and that this information can be useful to other producers,” he says. “One of the biggest problems today is the cost of fertilizers and the risk of production. We are using more and more herbicides, the effect is not as expected and we keep using more and more. In addition to the issues of rotation and biodiversity, it also requires a lot of money,” he analyzes regarding the high load of inputs.
Another question is the viability of advancing an agroecological model in a country so economically dependent on agroindustrial chains, which contribute 23% of the Gross Domestic Product. Rolando García Bernado, researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and part of the National Agrarian Group, a team made up of agronomists, economists and sociologists from different universities, notes an increase in productive experiences linked to agroecology and says that the viability of a transition requires a multidimensional approach.
“There is a greater interest in practices that tend to ‘dechemicalize’ production. There is greater social awareness and intergenerational concern for producing in a more sustainable way. We are also experiencing an environmental saturation of the current production model, which is beginning to be recognized by the same actors in production. This is added to an economic inefficiency of the production model, which is more expensive and requires more and more inputs,” he explains.
The viability of an agroecological path in productions such as wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers is more complex due to the production volumes and, mainly, due to the country’s economic model that depends on the export of a large quantity of grains.
“Small-scale production experiences, which end up in the food circuit, are economically and environmentally viable. But on a macroeconomic scale, my view is more pessimistic. The discussion of volumes appears. Agroecological production costs are lower, but they also produce less volume. If the country wants to replace its way of producing, it has to accept that the quantity of grains it can export will decrease. We would gain in sustainability and in caring for common goods, but we would lose the ability to generate foreign exchange income. That is delicate in a context of high tension in the Argentine economy,” he concludes.
It is already evening in Tandil. Damián Colucci invites us to walk through the countryside. He talks about the trees he planted, the animals he has, and takes a handful of flour out of a bag. He talks about working this fertile land, about being a farmer in a country so far from the countryside. And he concludes by saying: “I produce a lot of food for myself, for my family, and for others who buy from me. And I live in the countryside. This is not just my productive unit. It is my life. What more can I ask for? This is paradise.”
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