Enzo's wheat, among the colors of Atessa
Enzo Suriani is a young farmer from Atessa, in the province of Chieti, in the Abruzzo region celebrated by Gabriele D'Annunzio, a strong and gentle land, rich in color, a generous and stubborn land that produces exceptional wheat. Enzo was born there, among those colors and landscapes, and it was there that he learned from his father the art of hard work and the courage to dream.
The greatest satisfaction is knowing that my wheat stays in Italy and is eaten by the Italian people. This is why I love the Armando Wheat Project: it's so different from eating pasta made with wheat from abroad.
I have one world-class quality: I worked 16-hour days for 30 years. Sometimes even 24. I picked up milk, got up at 5:00 and returned home at 1:00, and after lunch I worked at the company. I could have joined the post office or taken on a government job; I had the opportunity at the time.
But I never liked it; that wasn't the life I wanted. Enzo is a hard worker; when the harvest arrives, he starts at 5 in the morning and finishes at midnight. He's a hard worker, but he has one major flaw: he's too big for his hands. He buys, buys, buys... I help him with the sales side and the accounting, but don't ask me to ride the new combine harvester, all buttons and knobs, all electronics.
Agriculture has changed, and I can't keep up with the changes. For example, he spent a lot of money on this machine...
And Enzo confirms:
I got it 20 days ago. We're finishing up the optional extras. The mechanic comes every day and we install the various parts. It's a long job. God bless us, we hope the car starts soon.
It's super-technological. Large, powerful, innovative, with a retractable bar for road use, so we don't have the hassle of assembling and disassembling it. It allows you to travel and work safely.
It is a harvesting machine: it harvests the wheat, separates it, collects the grain in a tank which then transfers it to the truck that takes it to the warehouses.
But Enzo's isn't a flaw; on the contrary, it's the courage of an entrepreneur aware of the times he lives in, of a man who knows where he wants to go, aware of the path he must take to realize his dream:
We need to keep up with the times. The agriculture of 40 years ago is no longer applicable today. We must face competition, we must comply with safety regulations, we must produce ever more with increasingly grueling hours. My goal is to continue growing, to safeguard my family and guarantee their future.
A dream of mine is to own my own farm, to secure a future with a good tract of land. Earned through hard work, little by little, the fruit of constant and patient work in the fields. Dreams are dreams, you never know where they'll take you: I don't know where mine will take me, but I hope very far...
Sweet words to the ears of a father who sees in his son's hands the continuity of what he has sown in a lifetime:
Working for yourself ensures control over your work output, without having to compete with colleagues who tend to do as little as possible. Working hours must be flexible; they can't be punctuated by long rest periods. There's time for lunch and a break, but working hours in agriculture depend on what needs to be done; nature doesn't adapt to our rhythms, but the opposite.
There are days when the work is intense. A typical day begins at 5:00 a.m. We start by preparing the combine harvester before heading to the fields: refueling, greasing, cleaning, and arriving at the fields around 7:00 a.m. We return home at 11:00 or midnight.
Sometimes you may have to return early to fix a technical problem in the workshop, working all night to return to the fields the next morning, without even an hour's rest.
This is the life of a farmer, a life that can't be sustained without passion and love. Because all that hard work might not be enough; there's always the sky to contend with.
The unknowns are tied to the weather; you have to chase it and harvest as quickly as possible. The weather also has a huge impact. This is an area ideal for both durum and soft wheat (in the last 30 years, we've mainly switched to durum wheat). The wheat is fabulous: protein, quality, and quantity, all thanks to the clayey soil. But this soil is a tough beast: you have to work it when it decides; you can't decide. In dialect, it's called "foot pain." It's like a person: it has its own needs and its own time. It needs to rest and be reinvigorated at the right time. You have to work it slowly, with care. It's prepared for sowing, then it's sown, then the furrows are dug to let it breathe. In short, we do the work we have to do, we give it our all.
Then there's the Almighty who rules 99% of the time: if he wants, he'll make us harvest, if he doesn't...
But that passion and love were born a long time ago, taking shape and life when everything was still a game. Enzo knows this, and for this he feels privileged:
My passion began when I was a child. When I came home from school, I'd throw my backpack in a corner and instead of thinking about my homework, I'd go into the fields. At six, I was plowing with a crawler tractor; I was a bit reckless.
Being a farmer is either in your blood or you'll never be able to do it. It requires commitment and passion; if you don't have them, you're ruined. I love being a farmer, if only for these colors: from the aridity of plowing with the desert-like, black fields, to March, when nature awakens, to the golden yellow of ripening in June.
It feels like the cycle is over, I always feel a bit melancholy. But then another cycle begins again. The dream slowly develops: as a child, driving the tractor was a game, you pretended to be a grown-up. Today it's my job, the best job in the world.
A job no longer as tiring as it once was but in some ways more complicated, because progress always has a price:
With the use of machinery and innovation, we can do the work with less physical effort. On the other hand, the investment required is very high, and you have to work at an increasingly fast pace to recoup it. Wheat isn't hard work, but it does require investment.
Plowing begins in August, and so we have maintenance costs for the machinery and diesel. We need to ensure these expenses are proportionate to the time we dedicate to completing the operations: powerful machinery and many hectares to cover per day. After that, we prepare the seedbed with a base coat of fertilizer, then the actual sowing, followed by a good nitrogen fertilization, weed control with specific products, then fungicide, then another application of fertilizer. Sometimes a second application of fungicide is necessary, and the prices are quite high.
Sometimes a year isn't enough to recover your investment.
But then there's the other side of the coin, there's the poetry of reward that for someone like Enzo who lives by that passion and that love is not resolved in numbers:
The greatest satisfaction is knowing that my wheat stays in Italy and is eaten by the Italian people. This is why I love the Armando Wheat Project: it's so different from eating pasta made with wheat from abroad.
When Enzo talks about the Armando Pact his eyes light up, he feels part of this adventure:
Last year we produced 4.2 tons per hectare, which is a truly impressive figure; I'm satisfied. Considering our clayey and saline soil, this is a great achievement for me. Thankfully, I'm also getting the maximum protein percentage. I hope the project will be developed further.
Having a price that depends exclusively on the market doesn't guarantee we'll recoup the investment needed to produce excellent quality wheat. With the supply chain agreement, however, we have the certainty of a guaranteed minimum, which helps a lot. Of course, if we don't have the quantity, it's not Armando's fault or the supply chain agreement's fault. Furthermore, if we achieve exceptional quality, we get rewards. The future of agriculture lies in supply chain agreements.