Marche

Abstract

Similarly to Umbria and Tuscany, the countryside of the Marche Region has been shaped through the centuries by the activity of farmers living in scattered holdings. The Marche is a region of hills and mountains, and agriculture has had to adapt to difficult soils and environments. Presently, in agriculture, 42.5 % of the land is used for cultivations, 32.8 % is woods and only 6.7 % is pastures. Because of these difficulties, farmers have had to develop a particularly sophisticated environmental culture, which would allow them to be economically viable while respecting the delicate balance of a particularly fragile ecosystem. In the hill areas—as Sergio Anselmi notes—the small holding system has been successful, preserving ‘the territory, creating a myriad of perfectly integrated economic ecosystems, not only through a variety of cultivations using a combination of crops, vine and olives, with the rotation of forage cultivations, but also through an ingenious irrigation and draining system, which exploited rainwater and adopted ‘natural’ defenses based on hedges and carefully positioned trees, used for timber, fruit, and leaves.