Italian cooperative breathes new life into abandoned land seized from Camorra gangsters

In the bosom of Italy's 'Land of Fires', adjacent the Italian metropolis of Naples, the Camorra transgression organisation utilized to negociate amerciable dumping sites and pain undifferentiated discarded successful the unfastened air.

Terra Felix - Latin for ‘Fertile Land’ - is simply a societal cooperative that has been progressive successful the state of Caserta for much than 10 years. Four years ago, the authorities handed implicit immoderate spot that had been confiscated from the Camorra clan of Casalesi to the cooperative, including 12 hectares of land.

This antecedently uncultivated and abandoned onshore is opening to enactment the maturation of plants, acknowledgment to the cultivation of the cartoon thistle, which increases ungraded fertility and supports the cultivation of mushrooms done the accumulation of biomasses. 

People with disabilities are besides progressive successful this production.

“We are a societal cooperative," explains Terra Felix' Francesco Pascale. "Therefore, we clasp an existent motivation work and we person it written successful our statute: we indispensable enactment to make opportunities for the disabled. When we program a caller project, archetypal we deliberation astir the engagement of these radical successful the task and past we deliberation astir the rest.”

Arson attack

Only a fewer weeks ago, connected 15 August, Terra Felix's onshore was burnt down, the effect of an arson onslaught that destroyed 7 hectares belonging to the cooperative. 

But that hasn't deterred the radical surviving connected this land. They support moving it, successful a forward-looking manner, successful 4.0 greenhouses, wherever humidity and somesthesia detectors activate the indispensable intake of h2o automatically. These greenhouses tin nutrient up to 1 tonne of mushrooms per month.

A agelong roadworthy has already been covered, from the onshore of fires to automated greenhouses, and a batch much is inactive ahead.

“With our work, we ideate we tin screen a bully agelong of this road, truthful that we tin fto the beauty, and what this Terra Felix of ours tin connection us, travel up,” Pascale says.

The groove has been dug already and that cannot beryllium burnt down.