Hunting and territory: Arezzo, the bitterness of a farmer forced to continually suffer damage to his crops from wild animals, “70% of the harvest destroyed by wild boars”.
Desperate Corn Farmer: Demi Bonini looks around in desperation. Unfortunately, he is almost used to it, but this time the damage is so serious as to lead him to exasperation: 70 percent of his corn crop has been lost, eaten or destroyed by real herds of wild boars, herds of 40 or 50 animals that they make a handful of cereals on his fields, those of his company "Il Castellare", on the slopes of Monte San Savino, in the Arezzo area. “I produce, or rather, I would like to produce grapes, oil, cereals, in my approximately 30 hectares of land. But I don't know if I will still have the strength to go on in these conditions, I try to resist but my neighbors are abandoning agriculture, they are giving up because of too much damage and the absence of operational responses from politics ”. To save at least part of the grapes, which he collects and gives to the winery, Demi had to put in place a very expensive electro-welded fence which he also placed on the side towards the wood of other fields, but the wild boars often manage to pass, so the damage is only limited. “I am not interested in having reimbursements for damages - explains the really tried farmer - since they are also always late and certainly not adequate. I would like to be able to cultivate in peace, as it happened until a few years ago, when the density of wild animals was still reasonable and I knew I was losing 4 or 5 percent of the harvest but this does not go on, it is absolutely necessary to free our campaigns by an exorbitant number of animals ".
This is a battle, explains in turn the director of Coldiretti Arezzo, Giampiero Marotta, that "Coldiretti has certainly made his own, with a state of general mobilization on the subject that will lead to a continuous and increasingly massive pressure on the authorities to ensure that events such as the one that hit Bonini's company do not happen again ”. In fact, farmers are tired and disappointed by the empty and no longer acceptable promises - say Coldiretti - and "the wild boar issue has become a time bomb, which can explode at any moment: that of wild animals is turning into a social emergency ".
For this reason, the goal of Coldiretti Arezzo is to urge the institutions to tackle the problem by finding the most effective solutions and quickly avoiding the closure of the many damaged farms, taking into account that every day wild boars and other ungulates "eat" themselves over 10 thousand euros of Tuscan agricultural crops. In one year, the region recorded over 4 million euros of lost turnover for the agri-food sector. A given shock, with the countryside and crops of Tuscany actually under siege: 300 thousand wild boars, 153 thousand roe deer, 8.800 fallow deer, 3.600 deer and 2.500 mouflons. To which are added the growing predations of wolves and feral dogs to the flocks and the damage suffered by the many non-huntable species. And again, the risks to road safety - 1,5 accidents per day on average caused by wild animals - and possible health risks since the animals could be carriers of parasites and even infectious diseases.
November 13, 2013
Source: ArezzoNotizie