Coldiretti Turin turned to the prefect of the Piedmontese capital Claudio Palomba to submit the age-old question of damage caused by wild boars and wild to agricultural crops. "An emergency - explains Fabrizio Galliati, president of Coldiretti Turin - which is becoming, day by day, more and more complicated, also due to the blocking of the surveillance activity imposed by the regulations for the containment of Covid-19 ″. In the letter Coldiretti Torino reports to the Prefect "The great concern for the local farms which, continuously, they are taking extensive damage from wild, both to the cultivations in progress, and to the sowing, compromising the work of the coming months ".
Fabrizio Galliati specifies: "In many areas of the province farmers are no longer able to cultivate corn, because it has been repeatedly devastated by wild boars, starting from sowing to waxy ripening and beyond. The damage of the wild has caused changes in the farm's crop investments. During autumn and winter, the wild boars rooting devastated part of the turf of the polyphite meadows of many Turin areas, from the hills to the plains, so much so that the hays brought to the farm are buried and of low quality. Now, with spring, wild boars have targeted the wheat fields, where they make large holes to go and retrieve the cobs of corn grown the year before and buried with plowing. There is no shortage of reports of damage to horticultural crops, in the open field, as in the greenhouse.
In some Alpine valleys, wild boars have eliminated horticultural productions, such as potatoes. In recent years, wild boars have come to populate the hilly and lowland areas: the result is that farmers must protect vegetable gardens, orchards and open field crops, with electrified fences. In recent times, farmers are also worried about attacks by wild boars, directly on the mounds of silomais, located a few tens of meters from the stables, as well as the raids of wild boars often close to farms and inhabited areas ".
Coldiretti Turin, recalling that, according to data Ispra, Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, throughout Italy, the wild boar population has increased from 500 thousand specimens in 2010 to over one million today, and that the reports of damage caused to agriculture by wildlife received in the Piedmont Region in 2020 were over five thousand, stressed to the Prefect of Turin the need to intervene "by providing for the resumption of control and containment activities also for the Red Zone". Otherwise Coldiretti Torino foresees “serious profitability problems for the agricultural sector”.