Food self-sufficiency: how was it in the past?

Those who visit Damanhur today and go to eat in one of the community houses will definitely find some produce from the vegetable garden of the house, as well as produce that comes from Porta della Terra, the farm where many varieties of vegetables and grains are cultivated, cattle is raised, and there are nearly 80 families of bees, and where there is the Erbaluce grape harvest.

Many hectares of agricultural land are all joined together. This is a dream that has been realized after almost 30 years, when the first Damanhurian farmers went back and forth through the Valchiusella area.

In the 1980’s, the only lands we had purchased to cultivate as organically as possible were scattered in four or five towns, and the young community members who took care of the cows, potatoes, tomatoes and hay for the animals, spent more time on the tractor than in the fields!

Buying farmland in the Cuceglio plains has made it possible to create the Porta della Terra farm. It was painstaking work that was carried out by Pooka Gelso, an indomitable practical dreamer who began to establish relationships with all the landowners of the plains area starting in the late 1980s.

Pooka was not just an exceptional intermediary, he has also been a talented billiard player, because to buy the land that is strategic for us, he sometimes bought land that did not interest us at all, and then exchanged it for another piece of land, to then exchange that one for the land we were interested in!

Years of patient waiting, or perhaps it is more appropriate to say, years of patient sowing! Finally after many years, the harvest has arrived. We managed to buy the farm, but it was in miserable condition!

We demolished everything but kept the old bricks. The new farm was built with eco-building criteria, and the bricks were the only healthy thing that could be salvaged from the ruins we had bought!

Today there are about 20 people who live at Porta della Terra, counting the adults and children. There is an agritourism restaurant, “Il Tarassaco,”  and many developing projects in the works. The dream continues, as it should!