ARIANE LOTTI - An Italian regenerative story

Yep, there is absolutely scale.

And I focus on rice, but I grow a dozen crops.

And of those 480 hectares, over those 1,200 acres, about 350 hectares, so about 800, 900 acres, are in crop production.

We don't have 480 hectares in crop production.

And then about 45 hectares of that a year are in rice.

So it's not like, you know, there are a number of other crops being grown as well.

And why rice here? Okay, rice here, because it was a former, there are two things, right? What the landscape does naturally, right? So we're in a coastal flood plain, former marshlands, the soils are really heavy, they hold water really well, they're poorly drained, and rice likes that.

If you think about some of the major rice producing areas of the world, they are in coastal flood plains, where it's the mouth of the river, there's regular flooding, and you have that kind of marshland habitat.

And then there's water availability.

So we are along the Mediterranean coast, but we are very near to this river.

Even though the area is arid in the summertime, so during the main production season for rice, it rains in the fall, winter and spring.

Obviously those patterns are changing.

We can get kind of deeper into the water piece in a little bit if you'd like.

And it's flat, right? When you think about Tuscany, lots of hills, right? We've got hills maybe 20 kilometers away, and then you get into the classic hills of Tuscany.

And so the flat, the soil type, and the water availability is what kind of drove my grandparents to really start trying to grow rice here.

This is not one of the main rice-growing regions of Italy.

Italy is Europe's number one producer of rice.

And all of that rice, well, maybe 95% of that rice gets grown in the northern regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Veneto.

And so we're 10 rice growers right here.

And there are other pockets in Sardinia and Sicily.

There'll certainly be some Australian rice growers listening.

The region known as the Riverina in southern New South Wales is a big irrigation district.

In total, the southern Murray-Darling Basin, as it's known, the irrigation area is about the size of Germany.

It's a big geographical area.

That is big.