Visiting the guardians of the Timilia grain

The landscape around Camporeale in the Sicilian hinterland glows in impressive colors in early summer: lush green fields, bold pink flowers of the Italian sweet clover sulla and a bright blue May sky. On the very first morning of my visit to the producers of Valdibella, Caterina, a long-time employee, and Massimiliano, President of the cooperative, take me to a Valdibella field from where we have an impressive view of the region. It is characterized by rolling hills and small-scale agriculture as far as the eye can see.

As a co-founder of Crowd Container and a spaghetti consumer from the very beginning, I am finally visiting our southern Italian partners and friends at the Valdibella farmers' cooperative! One of the reasons I took the long train journey across Italy was to get to the bottom of the Timilia grain, an ancient southern Italian durum wheat that is used to make wonderful pasta.

Massimiliano was the initiator of Validbella over 20 years ago and has been working as an agronomic advisor for the small, locally based cooperative ever since. He tells me that timilia - or "tuminnia" in good Sicilian - has a history of several hundred years in southern Italy and has always been cultivated by the people. However, in the course of increased agricultural industrialization and internationalization in recent decades, old traditional durum wheat varieties have become increasingly rare in the region. Years ago, Valdibella set itself the task of taking special care of the Timilia grain and cultivating it once again.

During the course of the day, we then visit two Timilia producers from the cooperative, Enzo and Filippo. Both farmers have made one hectare of their land available to grow and reproduce pure Timilia seed. This ensures that all 12 Valdibella producers have sufficient, high-quality seed. Filippo and Massimiliano then tell me with obvious pride that the farmers of Valdibella have been working as agricultori custodi are recognized. At the end of 2015, a legal provision was passed in Italy to protect and improve biodiversity in the interests of agriculture and the food industry. Since then, Italian producers and producer groups have been able to register as "guardians" of individual crops that are threatened with extinction and are given the specific task of preserving, increasing the production and marketing of these crops.

The passionate producers then explain to me in broad Sicilian how important it is to maintain an ideal crop rotation for their farmland and how Timilia wheat is grown in rotation on different fields, alternating with various pulses - including chickpeas and black, green or red lentils. Every 5-7 years, sulla clover is then planted in a field for two seasons so that the soil can regenerate its fertility. During lunch with the Valdibella team, I also get to enjoy the sweet and aromatic sulla blossom honey, which we enjoy with Tuono almonds for dessert.

As Caterina, Massimiliano and I chat about all sorts of things over a plate of spaghetti and a glass of wine that evening and I mention that I not only really like the cinnamon note in Timilia pasta, but that penne, linguine & co. are never heavy for me, Caterina happily tells us about a future project: together with two other producer groups from the region and the University of Palermo, Valdibella has submitted a research project to scientifically prove the good digestibility of the Timilia grain. She is particularly pleased that they have been able to enter into a collaboration with the university's Faculty of Medicine, which means that medical specialists will also be studying the positive properties of her favorite grain. She is convinced that science will prove what the people of Sicily have known for a long time: Timilia is healthy!

After a long day with countless impressions and new information, I go to sleep shortly before midnight, tired and satisfied and already looking forward to the next morning, because I'm going to visit the oil mill and Valdibella's own wine cellar...