“Reopen the streets, we can’t throw away a thousand liters of milk a day”

by our correspondent
FONTANELICE «On the second day of isolation, while the Frisian and the red-spotted women were mooing, I called the mayor Beatrice Poli and asked her permission. She replied: “Go ahead, Devis, I just can’t send you someone as I hoped”». And so Devis Tattini, a farmer from Casalfiumanese (3,400 inhabitants, Valle del Santerno, Imola, Romagna) hooked up the bucket to the tractor and attacked the landslide from upstream while a friend of his with an excavator removed the tons of earth and mud from the valley landslide that had canceled the road leading to the “Capanaza” where, in addition to the cows, three families live. They have reopened a narrow path, the one necessary to let the small tank truck pass, the one carrying 10 quintals, with which they shuttle to the valley area where the trucks of the Tuscan dairy arrive, which has always bought the milk from their 70 cows.

«Indeed, now there are more animals because we also keep those of the Mazzantis: their stable is still isolated, there on the slope where the landslide that killed Enrico (Rivola, ed.) broke off on 2 May. Faced with the Almighty’s decision to change the face of our territory, we had to make do with the bulldozers because we can keep the milk in the refrigerators for a day or two and we were no longer reachable by the “usual” 150 quintal truck: we couldn’t throw away thousand liters of milk a day». As happened instead to the milk of the 70 Ronchini cows, in Baia Volpe, Fontalice, further up, still in the Santerno valley. “We are five families – says Maurizio Ronchini – and we can only move with the tractor, after the first days of total isolation we now bring the milk down with a tank, but it’s hard to resist like this”.

Umberto Tattini and Tommaso Mazzani: Tattini and his son Devis manage the stable in Casalfiumanese

Instead, the 90 Romagna cows (for beef) of the Carapias (130-hectare farms in Posseggio, Fontanelice, where once «there was also the parish with the priest and the elementary school») are starting to lack hay: «They are bringing it to us with helicopters because we can’t mow ours, but here everything has collapsed and we won’t even be able to stock up for the winter – says Gianfranco Carapia, 57, who also manages the orchards with his son Rudy – Meanwhile the first cherry harvest is already lost and the apricot one is compromised. How will we carry on? Simple, we have no alternatives: where could we go and live since no one, now with this catastrophe, will want to buy our land, our breeding».

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on Il Mattino