Our work
Cascina Bosco Fornasara practices regenerative agriculture that, through natural and sustainable techniques, aims to restore soil fertility and biodiversity, going beyond traditional organic methods.
Polyculture
Our farm primarily cultivates Carnaroli Classico rice, Rosa Marchetti rice, millet, peas, and beans, following the principles of polyculture, regenerative agriculture, and agroecology—methods that go beyond simple organic farming.
We apply crop rotations and intercropping with ancient varieties of cereals and legumes, integrated within an agroforestry system that promotes agricultural biodiversity.
We do not use synthetic chemicals or industrial fertilizers: we work in synergy with nature, promoting the soil’s self-fertilization mechanisms and protecting agroecosystems.
Our regenerative organic agriculture project was born with the goal of cultivating biodiversity and regenerating the soil, recreating habitats compromised by decades of intensive monoculture and chemical products. It is not just about growing crops without pesticides, but about changing mindsets: shifting from extractive agriculture to one that respects and conserves natural resources.
For this reason, we keep the fields always covered with vegetation, avoid deep plowing, practice minimal tillage, rotate crops, maintain grassed banks and borders, and, above all, plant thousands of trees, because each tree is a building block of ecosystem resilience.
Cover Crops
After each harvest, we sow cover crops, mixtures of herbaceous plants that remain in the fields during autumn and winter, protecting and enriching the soil. We do not practice plowing, but adopt minimal tillage, thereby preserving soil life and reducing the impact on its natural structure.
These cover crops counteract the depletion caused by intensive cultivation, increase biodiversity, and help control weeds and pathogens. Species such as ryegrass, oats, clover, and vetch fix organic nitrogen and improve soil fertility, releasing it gradually without polluting the water table, unlike chemical fertilizers. Rapeseed, rye, and mustard also play a valuable role: rapeseed breaks soil compaction with its deep roots, rye limits weeds, and mustard provides a natural defense against pests and pathogens.
In spring, the cover crops are mown and left on the ground, forming a green mulch—a natural pre-sowing weed control—that prevents weed seeds from germinating. This way, we sow on well-fertilized fields, ready to welcome new crops without depleting the soil, fully in line with the principles of regenerative agriculture.
Conservative Agriculture
Regenerative organic agriculture does not just preserve natural resources—it improves them. At the heart of this approach is the desire to collaborate with nature, abandoning the exploitative logic typical of intensive agriculture, which, through chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy tillage, depletes the soil and pollutes it.
In our fields of rice, millet, legumes, and cereals, we practice direct seeding or minimal tillage, techniques that avoid plowing and minimize mechanical disturbance of the soil. In this way, we cultivate while respecting microbial life, promoting natural self-fertilization processes, and maintaining a living and fertile soil.
The environmental benefits of these practices are numerous: vegetative cover reduces erosion, improves the soil’s ability to retain water, and supports the biodiversity of plants, insects, and wildlife. Moreover, by reducing tillage, fuel consumption decreases and CO₂ emissions are lowered, making regenerative agriculture a true ally in the fight against climate change.
Water
The water that irrigates our rice fields originates in the Alps and, after flowing through rivers and canals, reaches the fields through a network of dedicated ditches. Each plot is supplied directly, without passing through other lands: this ensures a more balanced and safe management of the water resource, without risk of contamination.
Contrary to what is often believed, rice irrigation does not involve waste. The water that irrigates our fields comes from the mountains and, following its natural course, would eventually reach rivers and the sea anyway. The rice field slows its path, allowing it to distribute across the fields, infiltrate the soil, and gradually return to the environment. In this way, the water is not consumed but valued, becoming an integral part of a regenerative agricultural system that respects natural cycles.
Furthermore, within the constantly flooded furrows, the water remains for a long time, transforming into a refuge for amphibians, insects, and aquatic organisms that find ideal conditions here to live and reproduce. The rice fields become dynamic ecosystems, places where aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity finds shelter and develops in balance with the crops.
Rotation of coltivations
Crop rotation is a fundamental agronomic practice that involves following one plant species with another from a different botanical family. This helps to maintain soil fertility and naturally control weeds and pests.
In our regenerative organic fields, we alternate rice, millet, legumes, buckwheat, cover crops, and winter cereals, creating a sequence of crops that require different types of management. In this way, weeds present in one crop cycle are naturally reduced, as the following crop interrupts their development and limits seed production.
The plants play complementary roles: legumes naturally enrich the soil with nitrogen, while more demanding species like rice consume large amounts. This balance between “generous” and “demanding” crops nourishes the soil without relying on chemical fertilizers, promoting the natural fertility of the fields and the health of the agricultural ecosystem.
The wildlife in our rice-fields
In our organic farm, thanks to a constant activity of protection of the environment and ecosystems, there is space to live and reproduce various specimens of wild fauna with high ecological value, such as badgers, foxes, hares, hedgehogs, polecats, stone martens and important specimens of avifauna, such as herons, including the rare purple heron and the very rare bittern, waders such as black-winged stilts and lapwings; snipes, woodpeckers, tits, sparrows, goldfinches, greenfinches; birds of prey, such as buzzards, hawks and kestrels; ducks, especially mallards and garganeys. Our rice fields, with always grassed banks, rows, wooded areas and wet side ones, are unique ecosystems and biodiversity reservoirs, they are semi-natural habitats of great importance not only for mammals and birds, but also for insects, reptiles, amphibians and fish such as carp, bleak, vaironi and chub.
The rows
These actions of reassessment of the landscape protect our biological cereals from wind, the soil from the hydric and eolic erosion, promote the settlement and colonization of many useful insects and supply nourishment to the wildlife.
Year after year, we created rows on the sides of our fields choosing indigenous species, including those which produce fruits and berries.
We put to adobe wild fruit trees – apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, cherry trees, apricot trees, sour cherry trees, walnut-trees, hazelnut-trees – in more than 7 km of edgings. These grow in a completely natural way and the fruits are not gathered so that they can serve as nourishment to the wildlife and the migrant birds. Leaves and fallen brunches enrich the soil with organic substances and give shelter to little mammals, reptiles, insects.
Moreover, we created hedges with trees and honey bushes – linden, privet, hawthorn – to contribute to the safeguard of pollinating insects, in particular of our friends, the bees, which every year delight us with their biological honey.
The restoration of the habitat is one of the starting points of our idea of agriculture.
In areas subject to intensive cultivations, the absence of hedges, trees and canals between the cultivated fields, deprives natural spaces and habitat to plants, insects anphibians, fish, birds and little mammals. On the contrary, planting trees allows us to vary the landscape, increase biodiversity and at the same time produce wood.
Furrows
For the safeguard of biodiversity, we eliminated every kind of pollutants and we commit ourselves not only in maintaining the furrows watered, but also in reducing to the minimum the dry-tillage practiced in the rice-fields.
After years of biological cultivation, careful handling of the fluxes and total absence of pesticides and fertilizers, harmful for the aquatic forms of life, our rice-fields returned to be populated by species, once common, but today almost disappeared or just occasionally retrievable, for example fish, tadpoles, larvae and dragonflies, not to mention many frogs, which naturally fight parasites harmful for the rice plants.
Burchvif
We collaborate with the Cultural Association “Burchvif” which, near our biological farm, manages one of the last reeds of Lomellina, very important for the conservation and the protection of some species of birds of communitarian interest, such as the bittern, the purple heron, the water rail, and the little bittern.
The reed can be visited all the year and, most of all in spring, you can listen to the “mooing” of the bittern, the territorial singing of this exclusive and rare ardeid which lives and reproduces here. We work closely to the Association, in defense of the territory and biodiversity, aiming to build ecological “corridors” which can put in contact our rice fields and the oasis, so that the wildlife can move undisturbed to search for food.
In our fields, indeed, the constant presence of amphibians such as frogs and tree frogs, attracts many species of ardeids including the rare bittern, the purple heron, the grey heron and various waders such as Cavalieri d’Italia and lapwings.
Research
In our regenerative organic rice fields, scientific research has always been an integral part of our daily work. Over the years, we have collaborated with several organizations, including Rete Semi Rurali, Legambiente, DEAFAL AOR, and various Italian universities (Milan, Pavia, Florence), with the goal of promoting biodiversity, preserving ancient seeds, and protecting agricultural ecosystems.
Together with the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the University of Pavia, and CREA (Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economics Analysis), we have taken part in projects such as Core-Save, dedicated to safeguarding local historical seeds, as well as studies on animal and plant biodiversity and experimental research to evaluate the effectiveness of natural biostimulants in rice growth and in containing fungal diseases.
We are also partners of the Lilacs for Soil project, which recognizes our farm as a concrete example of good regenerative farming practices.
These collaborations have allowed us to unite scientific research and farming practice, demonstrating how regenerative organic agriculture can be a model capable of combining productivity, environmental protection, and the enhancement of biodiversity.
