For much of the winter and spring of 2022, Luigi Ferraris, a 58-year-old rice farmer from Mortara, a town in the Po Valley, remained hopeful. Rainfall had decreased by 40% in the first six months of the year and snow had accumulated thinly in the Alps, reducing the amount of water flowing through the melting snow to the Po River by 88%; The flow in the river and the channels connected to it was at a historic low.
But Ferraris believed that things would return to normal soon. “I thought the lack of water would be temporary,” he says.
Historically, access to water had never been an obstacle in this lowland. It is located in the heart of the Po Valley, or Pianura Padana, a floodplain in northern Italy where large areas of land were originally swamps and a hotbed of malaria. For centuries, local farmers have fought to reduce water, build drainage and level land to slowly transform the wetlands into fields and rice paddies.
“In this area the problem has always been to keep the water out,” said Alberto Lasagna, director of Confagricoltura Pavia, a local branch of the General Confederation of Italian Agriculture. “It’s never been the other way around.”
Ferraris only realized the full extent of what he was about to lose in late May 2022, when his rice fields had not yet turned their usual lush green. “They were all brown,” he says. “It all looked like dry straw.”
In 37 years of running the rice farm he inherited from his grandfather, Ferraris had never seen anything like it. He lost more than half his harvest and he was not alone.
Italy is Europe’s largest rice producer, growing around 50% of the rice produced in the EU. Most of the rice fields are located in the Po Valley, which extends across much of the north of the country. It is in these fields that the unique risotto rice varieties, such as carnaroli and arborio, are grown.
In 2022, the worst drought in 200 years hit the Po, Italy’s longest river. The waterway is the lifeline of a complex web of canals built between the Middle Ages and the 19th century, which serve as the main source of irrigation for the rice fields. That year, Italy lost 26,000 hectares of rice fields, according to Ente Nazionale Risi, the national rice authority, and rice production fell by more than 30%. Last year the drought continued and the harvest from another 7,500 hectares of rice fields was lost.
Today, rice farmers struggling to recover from the effects of drought face an uncertain future. “The higher the temperatures, the more frequent and intense these extreme events will be,” said Marta Galvagno, a biometeorologist at the Aosta Valley Environmental Protection Agency.
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Every month, Marta climbs a tower 2,200 meters high on the Italian side of the Matterhorn to collect data from instruments such as the eddy covariance sensor, left, used to assess the impact of the climate crisis
Over the past two years, Ferraris, like other farmers in the area, has tried to diversify his crops to reduce the risks of the climate crisis. He has reduced the area devoted to rice fields and started growing crops such as corn, which require less water.
“The climate is changing and I’m afraid there will be more droughts,” said Ferraris, whose farm lost about €150,000 [£129,000] in 2022. However, rice remains his largest crop. He recently started monitoring snowfall in the Alps and checking water levels in Lake Maggiore daily. “It’s hard to sleep at night,” he says.
Ferraris is particularly concerned about the production of carnaroli classico, a refined variety of rice. Thanks to its ability to withstand high cooking temperatures and absorb flavors, carnaroli is considered the “king of risotto”, but is also extremely delicate and vulnerable to changes in climate.
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Antonio uses a system of locks and the natural terrain to adjust water levels; a gauge measures the levels in the Cavour Canal in Chivasso, near Turin. The canal, dating from 1852, helps regulate the water supply to the Po
Last year, after peeling and bleaching, only 38% of Ferrari’s carnaroli classico harvest was salable. “Because of the drought, rice [grains] often divided,” he says.
Giovanni Pochettino, a farmer in the UNESCO-recognized Collina Po nature reserve, less than a kilometer from the river’s banks, also grows carnaroli and shares Ferraris’ concerns.
“We are having increasing problems with the production of carnaroli rice as it suffers from the August heat,” Pochettino said. “These rice varieties were developed almost 100 years ago, when temperatures were completely different.”
Pochettino has considered stopping the production of carnaroli, the quality of which he likens to a fine wine. “Margins are low,” he says, adding that rice mills that buy his crop need perfect grains. “The financial return does not reflect all the hard work it takes to grow this type of rice.”
Filip Haxhari, researcher at Ente Nazionale Risi, says that due to the ongoing drought, carnaroli production has fallen by 50% in 2022, endangering a unique rice variety. “Only carnaroli and other similar varieties have a genetic trait that allows them to absorb herbs, aromas and spices and create traditional risotto,” he says. “It is unlike any other rice variety in the world.”
Francesco Avanzi, a hydrologist at the International Center for Environmental Monitoring (Cima) research foundation, explains that the 2022 Po drought was mainly caused by high temperatures and little snowfall in the Alps. Nearly two-thirds of all the water that flows into the Po throughout the year comes from melting Alpine snow.
“The snow usually melts very slowly between April and June, allowing it to penetrate the ground very efficiently,” says Avanzi. Snowmelt is especially important in summer and replenishes the river when rainfall is low.
“Thanks to this slow release of snow water, rice farmers know that river flows will be consistently high between May and July,” says Avanzi.
In 2022, snow water supplies in the Alps fell by about 60% compared to the average of the previous decade. “The winter of 2021-2022 was the worst, but 2023 was similar,” says Avanzi. According to the latest data from Cima, snow water supplies fell by 63% in February. “It doesn’t look very rosy,” says Avanzi.
In recent years, an increasing number of rice farmers in northern Italy have adopted “dry sowing” of rice, a technique that requires less irrigation water and labor but which some experts say, counterintuitively, also contributes to an increasingly drier ground. “The water used to flood the rice fields was not wasted,” Lasagna said. “It penetrated the ground and went back to the river.”
Haxhari and his team are working to develop new rice varieties that require less water and are more resistant to climate changes. “The drought of 2022 was heartbreaking. I have never seen so many plants die in such large numbers,” says Haxhari, a researcher for more than forty years. “But it provided an important opportunity for research.”
The events allowed scientists to test nuovo prometeoa drought-resistant new rice variety now on the market.
However, Nuovo prometeo is not suitable for cooking risotto, and while Haxhari says his team aims to develop new varieties that do justice to the traditional dish, Ferraris remains skeptical that small rice producers like him, who focus on a high-quality product quality, they will. benefit from these new varieties. “If we want to attract customers, we have to focus on high-quality products,” he says.
Water consumption also remains a concern. By 2022, Ferraris’ rice farm experienced a 90% water reduction. “We are talking about rice,” says Ferraris. “You still need water to make it grow.”
The recent drought was likely exacerbated by infrastructure failures. Research by Italy’s national statistics agency Istat found that the country’s aqueducts lost 42% of the water they carried in 2020 due to structural leaks. Climate and agriculture experts say new systems to store water and steps to optimize the existing supply network are crucial to mitigating the impact of future droughts.
“If we implement mitigation and adaptation strategies, we can still avoid a catastrophe,” says Galvagno. “As scientists, we have really said everything there is to say. What is missing now are economic investments and the political will to implement these strategies.”
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