In the framework of its activities addressed to citizens, last May 17 the Municipal Botanical Museum ‘Aurelia Josz’ in Milan organized a free visit to its garden. On the occasion, the Museum curators invited CREA’s researchers Daniele Cavalli and Luciano Pecetti–who had provided seeds of legume species to the Museum–to give short talks to the visitors while walking through the sown garden plots, describing the observable plant species and the research activity carried out at CREA involving those species.
Stopping before the demonstration plots, visitors could see, and hear about species mixtures of either temperate or Mediterranean forage legume species, as well as field pea and white lupin both as a pure stand and associated with cereals (oat or barley).
Talks focused on presenting possible agronomic and environmental advantages deriving from growing more legumes than at present, on the one hand, and from intercropping different species, mainly legumes and cereals, on the other. Daniele used a set of hand-made wooden panels, to schematically but colourfully depict the field differences passing from a continuous monoculture to the crop rotation, to the intercropping.
Leaflets in Italian of the IntercropVALUES project were distributed. The visitors were completely unaware of the topics approached and reportedly appreciated the information provided. Anecdotally interesting for the project’s Task 3.4 in WP3, a lady outside the farming world according to her background raised the question of how difficult sorting and using such different crops as legumes and cereals could be when they are grown together. This emblematic question paralleled the interest witnessed during a meeting of the Italian Co-innovation case study (CICS) for the project’s WP1 held last year, where farmers were eager to understand and learn from ground-breaking colleagues how machinery could be adapted to intercropping.
This news article was written by Luciano Pecetti (CREA)