It is very sweet, has a red cheek that makes you want to bite it, is slightly larger than its “sisters” and can also be harvested when ripe. But above all it is resilient to climate change and extreme events which in 2023 severely penalized agriculture, in particular fruit growing with 23% less product harvested throughout the region. Pears, cherries, nectarines, plums and apricots are the fruits that have been most affected by the climate shocks.
This is what Coldiretti Toscana says on the basis of the latest report on the progress of agriculture.
“Our food future will depend on our ability to adapt our companies and our crops to the effects of climate change by selecting and studying resilient varieties and crops, also deriving from green genetics, to very changing conditions such as exceptionally warm winters, like the one that we have just left behind what was classified as the hottest in the last 70 years, or long periods of drought like the dramatic one in 2022. – explains the president of Coldiretti Tuscany, Letizia Cesani – Given that agriculture is the economic sector most damaged by the climate but also most committed to combating it, the collaborations we have activated since last year with important partners in the world of research and training, including IBE-CNR, CREA and Valoritalia, for example in the wine sector, with the aim of supporting the transition and mitigation process and increasing the resilience of our companies”.
Maria Pia, this is the name of the resistant apricot grown at the foot of the Pisan mountains, is the result of research. The result of the collaboration between the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Pisa, which has always been at the forefront in research into the selection of fruit varieties, and a historic agricultural company in Rigoli, in the municipality of San Giuliano Terme, which also produces kiwis and plums, the Maria Pia is grown and harvested only here. One of its characteristics is precisely that of being resilient, even tolerating hot winters, heavy rains and sudden changes. Her extraordinary ability to adapt is due to the many parents who helped select her in the laboratory, coming not only from Tuscany but also from the Vesuvian area, characterized by a temperate Mediterranean climate, but also from Canada and France. Maria Pia is a perfect blend that has taken the best of each of the parent varieties.
“The most common apricot varieties need cold and dry winters to complete their vegetative cycle and then arrive at harvest time in June. The Maria Pia, however, does not. – explains Giovanni Pacini, fruit grower from Rigoli, in the municipality of San Giuliano Terme – It is the only apricot that was harvested in abundance, the other varieties we grow either did not flower or lost their flowers”.
To accelerate mitigation interventions by making tools and knowledge available to agricultural businesses, Coldiretti Toscana is once again asking for greater commitment from the institutions to accompany innovation from agriculture 5.0 with drones, robots and satellites to the new green no GMO genetics. But we also need – concludes Coldiretti Toscana – structural investments with long-term projects that go beyond the emergency such as the recovery of the company lakes already registered in Tuscany whose use is blocked by bureaucracy right down to the reservoirs for collecting rainwater, which are currently at a standstill to 11%, to be used for agricultural production and to generate clean hydroelectric energy.
For information www.toscana.
Source: Press Office
