Azienda Agricola Barduca
Francesco Barduca founded his family-run farm in 1977, and by the following year he was already starting to sell various farm-grown vegetables. Today they produce fresh and ready-to-eat vegetables in six hectares of greenhouses and 50 hectares of open field, cultivated entirely organically. They use exclusively mechanical means to remove weeds, prefer biological pest control and spray organic-origin products to combat disease. Following a four-year crop rotation programme with careful fertilising, the land is worked to increase its organic substance and preserve the soil’s fertility. The credo is intelligent agriculture that respects the land and sees man collaborate with nature to produce food for all. Several washing and packaging lines in an agro-industrial facility prepare ready-to-eat salads with high quality standards thanks to its many certifications and periodic analytical checks. The company’s eco footprint is constantly monitored and the weight of plastic packaging has been reduced by 20%, with wood or cardboard used for secondary packaging. New solutions are continually being tried out for working better and with less waste, processing a “field-to-table” product that enables consumers to save time and improve their health.
Francesco Barduca’s objective: “I started with a tiny plot of land,” he says, “but today I farm about 50 hectares of land, all organically. This project is all about the origins, traceability, history and culture of the place that gives it life because I want to be able to hand over to the new generations the fertile land I inherited from my parents, not a soil left sterile and stressed by too much farming.”