Ferrara, 26 June 2024 – He can play a bit rhetorical, this is not always the case. If the mountain does not go from Muhammadthen Muhammad will go to the mountain.
Here we are not talking about mountains and prophets – perhaps about people with a far-sighted outlook, yes – but about countryside and its fruits. It is the primary sector, the largest open-air industry in the province. Industry that has been struggling for years due to lack of personnel. It is a field in which Mauro Grossi boasts considerable experience, born in 1960, of Bondeno a town where people who are used to rolling up their sleeves live, have been involved in the agricultural and fruit and vegetable sector for a lifetime.
So what to do? There labor an increasingly rare commodity, the kids who turn their backs on the rows for a console. So he thought he’d go and get it. At the helm of the Este fruit growers’ association Afein via Bologna, rents a bus, thanks also to the La Valle company, where workers from the province of Modena get on direction Ferrara. “They are women, all specialists. When the pear harvest ends there and the kiwi harvest starts here, we make these trips and bring them to our factory. This way we also solve what is one of the problems of harvesting in the countryside, the lack of continuity in the working days. In this way they are used for quite a few months. And for us it is a great advantage.”
While the Quality agricultural work networka control room established by the INPS with the prefecture, the Province, trade associations, trade unions and municipalities, puts ideas on the table with the aim of creating free transport lines for laborers – transport is one of the doors through which the corporals enter – they don’t waste time.
“It’s about it – he explains Grossipresident of the pear protection consortium Emilia Romagna PGI, head of the Este fruit growers’ association, a group of 600 producers – of an agreement that has all the characteristics, which was made with the unions”. The association – the products apricots, strawberries, kiwis, apples, pears, peaches and nectarines, plums – is the fruit of an idea by Luigi Salvi. “He was a pioneer in this sector”, recalls Grossi. “We bring agricultural employees to the factories and also to the fields. A rather complex organization,” says Mimma La Valle at the wheel of the transport company that bears her name, general director Paolo Pastorello. There are one hundred employees, 30% of whom are women. Who welcome the workers with a smile, the straw hat just a memory in an increasingly 4.0 agriculture.
