Farming should be life-affirming.
It can be beautiful.
It can be an integral part of the natural ecosystem instead of being the vehicle for its destruction.
Bella Terra is a smallholding in the middle of land returning to wilderness; fields and forest in the mountains of Italy, on the periphery of the comune of Assisi. For ten years we have lived and worked on less than a hectare of the thirteen hectares we steward. Our food and medicinal plants are grown in a perennial polyculture, on the edge of woodlands, leaving the remaining twelve hectares to return to Mother Nature. The gardens and fields are naturally evolving into a food forest, erasing the line between the cultivated and the wild. The vegetables, fruit, nuts, olives, and herbs are produced in a closed system, relying only on our compost and the soil ecosystem for nutrition. Our poultry run free and forage. Our donkeys roam the old fields and woodlands. We hope to provide for all our needs on-site.
We are working to create a self-perpetuating ecosystem using a hybrid of climate science, recent soil biochemistry, and agroforestry; always with close observation and respect for the ways of the natural world. We save our seeds. We propagate our berry bushes and trees. Our organic waste—from the gardens, fields, and the household—goes into the soil. We irrigate with collected rainwater. There are no costs beyond the start up costs of buying the land, purchasing a small used tractor for hauling, and building a greenhouse. Though we sell our eggs, oil, and vegetables, our current focus is providing plants to the surrounding community, encouraging them to start gardens rather than be dependent on us. Our farming philosophy lies somewhere between resilient agriculture, benign neglect, and preparedness for collapse.
We are a family of four; artists, scientists, environmentalist tree huggers. We live within the seasons, growing much of our food and protecting the beauty of the surrounding natural world. We cannot imagine doing anything else. We cannot imagine loving doing anything else as much.
Zia Gallina is our botanist. She is an artist and a writer. For many years, she was an instructor with the U.S. National Park Service lecturing on native and naturalized medicinal plants. She received a graduate fellowship in biology from American University, in Washington D.C., where she taught biology and environmental science.
Zio Volpe is our carpenter, tree specialist, and systems manager. He did his surgical residency at Harlem Hospital in New York City. For twenty-two years, he was a biomedical researcher at The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. .
Tanya la Gatta is our webmaster. She grew up on an urban farm on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia, Tanya works as a photographer, video maker, artist, farmer and artisan.
Xander Cervo is our engineer and in charge of transport logistics. He worked in the United Kingdom as an engineer. In Italy he is a Reiki practitioner and an artist, rapidly becoming a donkey whisperer and passionate breeder of hot chilli peppers.
