The agricultural market exhibition will be held in a single day. Bad weather penalized fruit production
BORGO VALBELLUNA. “Mele a Mel” jumps again this year but on Sunday 10 October “Sapori del Borgo” will return to Piazza Papa Luciani in Mel. The event will thus once again replace the great “Mele a Mel” event, which, for reasons linked to the stringent rules on the containment of Covid, cannot be proposed.
Organized by the “Mele a Mel” association, the “Sapori del Borgo” event will take place in the form of a market over a single day, from 8.30 to 18.30, involving about fifty exhibitors, who will thus have the opportunity to show agricultural but also artisanal productions.
Apple production this year did not however go according to expectations, aggravating an already difficult situation. «The pandemic has also made our association suffer», explains the director of “Mele a Mel” Oscar Padovani, «primarily because the demonstrations have been canceled and we have sold less, as there are no more agricultural markets. In 2020 they all jumped. Then the farms in the area are also suffering from a situation that is given by a rather precarious climatic condition: in recent months the hail has struck several times in patches of patches in the Left and Right Piave, completely destroying production in some areas. I myself took it six times. The apples that we managed to save are therefore not perfect from an aesthetic point of view: the farmers are in difficulty. The forecasts were rosy for 2021, but in the end it wasn’t like that ». Among the apples of Valbelluna, the pom de la rosetta, the russet apples, the ferro Cesio, the renette have in part been saved.
It was therefore not even possible to establish the exact quantity of apples harvested, as well as the other types of products to which small farmers (for the most part contributors to the La Fiorita agricultural cooperative) dedicate themselves: from tomatoes to caps, passing through radicchio. and the salad, up to the zucchini. And the reason is always the same: the damage done by wildlife, from deer to wild boar, has been devastating.
Meanwhile, attention to production is also growing in the Sinistra Piave. “By now the consumer is turning more and more towards eco-sustainable products with a low environmental impact,” says Padovani. «Certainly organic will be the future. We are lucky enough to live in an area that is still quite clean, not comparable with the areas of the Lower Po Valley in terms of pollution, and this leads us to have higher quality products than those of other parts of Italy. The soils are still intact and not contaminated by pesticides. And the fact of having small productions is a guarantee, because they are not intensive and above all because the producer is the first guarantor of the final product, being himself a consumer ».
To encourage future production, Padovani would expect the bodies in charge “to be interested in the problems of fruit growing in Belluno: we have the Asian bug that destroys crops, as an omniphagous insect, making apples and pears unsaleable. In the province of Verona, the phytosanitary service has taken care to introduce the antagonist insect of the bedbug to fight it, that is the samurai wasp. With us in the Belluno area, however, nothing has been done, because there are no political interests ».
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