Luigi Ferraris, a 58-year-old rice farmer from Mortara, a town in the Po valley, remained hopeful through much of the winter and spring of 2022. In the first six months of the year, precipitation decreased by 40% and snow accumulated thinly in the Alps, leading to an 88% decrease in the amount of water coming into the Po River due to snowmelt; Flow in the river and its tributary canals was at its lowest level in history.
However, Ferrari people believed that things would return to normal soon. “I thought the lack of water would be temporary,” he says.
Historically, access to water has never been an obstacle in this plain. It is located in the heart of the Po valley or Pianura PadanaA floodplain in northern Italy where large areas of land were originally swamps and malarial beds. For centuries, local farmers have struggled to push back water by building drainage and leveling land to gradually transform wetlands into crop fields and paddy fields.
“The problem in this region has always been the retention of water,” says Alberto Lasagna, director of Confagricoltura Pavia, a local branch of the General Confederation of Italian Agriculture. “It’s never been the other way around.”
Ferraris only realized the full extent of what they were about to lose at the end of May 2022, when the rice fields had not returned to their usual lush green. “They were all brown,” he says. “They all looked like dry straw.”
Ferraris had never seen anything like this in his 37 years of running the rice farm he inherited from his grandfather. He lost more than half his harvest, and he was not alone.
Italy is Europe’s largest rice producer, producing around 50% of the rice produced in the EU. Most of the rice fields are in the Po valley, which extends across much of the north of the country. Unique varieties of risotto rice such as carnaroli and arborio are grown in these fields.
In 2022, the worst drought in the last 200 years hit Italy’s longest river, the Po. The waterway forms the lifeblood of a complex network of canals built between the Middle Ages and the 1800s, which serve as the main source of irrigation for rice fields. That year, Italy lost 26,000 hectares (64,000 acres) of rice fields, and rice production fell by more than 30%, according to the national rice authority Ente Nazionale Risi. Last year the drought continued and yields from 7,500 hectares of rice fields were lost.
Today, rice farmers trying to recover from the effects of drought face an uncertain future. “The higher the temperatures, the more frequent and intense these extreme events will be,” says biometeorologist Marta Galvagno of the Aosta Valley Environmental Protection Agency.
-
Marta climbs a 2,200-meter-high tower on the Italian side of the Matterhorn every month to collect data from instruments such as the eddy covariance sensor at left, which is used to assess the impact of the climate crisis.
Over the past two years, Ferraris, like other farmers in the region, have tried to diversify their products to reduce the risks posed by the climate crisis. He reduced the area devoted to paddy fields and started growing crops that require less water, such as corn.
Ferraris, whose farm suffered a loss of approximately 150,000 Euros, says, “The climate is changing and I am afraid that there will be other droughts.” [£129,000] But rice remains its biggest revenue earner. Recently he started monitoring snowfall in the Alps and checking the water levels in Lake Maggiore every day. “It’s hard to sleep at night,” he says.
Ferraris are particularly concerned about the production of carnaroli classico, a refined variety of rice. Thanks to its ability to withstand high cooking temperatures and absorb flavors, carnaroli is considered the “king of risotto”, but it is also extremely delicate and sensitive to climate changes.
-
Antonio uses a floodgate system and natural terrain to regulate water levels; One gauge measures levels in the Cavour canal at Chivasso, near Turin. Dating from 1852, the canal helps regulate the water that feeds the Po
After peeling and blanching last year, only 38% of Ferrari’s carnaroli classico harvest became marketable. “Rice due to drought [grains] “It gets divided frequently,” he says.
Giovanni Pochettino, a farmer in the UNESCO-recognized Collina Po nature reserve, less than a kilometer from the river’s banks, also grows carnaroli and shares the Ferraris’ concerns.
“We are experiencing more and more difficulties in the production of carnaroli rice due to the August heat,” says Pochettino. “These rice varieties were developed almost 100 years ago, at a time when temperatures were completely different.”
Pochettino is considering abandoning the production of carnaroli, whose quality he likens to a fine wine. “Margins are low,” he says, adding that the rice mills that buy his crop need excellent grains. “The financial return does not reflect all the hard work required to grow this type of rice.”
Researcher Filip Haxhari from Ente Nazionale Risi says that due to the long drought, carnaroli production will drop by 50% in 2022, threatening a unique rice variety. “Only carnaroli and other similar varieties have various genetic characteristics that allow them to absorb spices, flavor and seasonings and create traditional risotto,” he says. “It is different from any other rice variety in the world.”
Francesco Avanzi, a hydrologist at the International Center for Environmental Monitoring (Cima) research foundation, explains that the 2022 Po drought was mainly caused by high temperatures and little snowfall in the Alps. Almost two-thirds of the water flowing into the Po throughout the year comes from melting snow in the Alps.
“Snow generally melts very slowly between April and June, which allows it to penetrate the soil very efficiently,” says Avanzi. Melting snow in the summer months renews the river, especially when rainfall is low.
“Thanks to this slow release of snow water, rice farmers know that river flow will be consistently high between May and July,” says Avanzi.
In 2022, snow water resources in the Alps decreased by approximately 60% compared to the average value of the previous decade. “The winter of 2021-2022 was the worst, but 2023 was similar,” says Avanzi. According to Cima’s latest data, there was a 63% decrease in snow water resources in February. “It doesn’t look very rosy,” says Avanzi.
In recent years, a growing number of rice farmers in northern Italy have adopted “dry planting,” a technique that uses less irrigation water and labor but, some experts say, counterintuitively also contributes to increasingly dry soil. “The water used to flood the rice fields was not wasted,” says Lasagna. “It penetrated the soil and returned to the river.”
Haxhari and his team are working to develop new rice varieties that need less water and are more resistant to climate changes. “The drought in 2022 was heartbreaking, I have never seen so many plants dying in such numbers,” says Haxhari, who has been a researcher for more than 40 years. “But it provided an important opportunity for research.”
The events allowed scientists to test new prometeoA new drought-tolerant rice variety is now on the market.
But Nuovo prometeo is not suitable for cooking risotto, and although Haxhari says his team aims to develop new varieties that will do justice to the traditional dish, Ferrari is doubtful that small rice producers like his, who focus on high-quality product, will use the product. Take advantage of these new varieties. “If we want to win over customers, we need to focus on high-quality products,” he says.
Water consumption also remains a concern. In 2022, the amount of water on Ferraris’ rice farm decreased by 90%. “We’re talking about rice,” Ferraris says. “You still need water to grow.”
The last drought was likely made worse by infrastructure failures. The research conducted by Italy’s national statistics office Istat revealed that the country’s aqueducts lost 42% of the water they carried in 2020 due to structural leaks. Climate and agriculture experts say new systems to store water and steps to optimize the existing supply network are vital to mitigating the effects of future droughts.
“We can still avoid a disaster if we implement mitigation and adaptation strategies,” says Galvagno. “As scientists, we have truly said everything there is to say. “What is currently lacking is economic investment and the political will to implement these strategies.”
Find more endangerment news and follow biodiversity reporters here Phoebe Weston And patrick greenfield On X for the latest news and features