L'orticoltura biologica: evoluzione, principi ispiratori e qualit\ue0 dei prodotti

This paper is aimed to discuss the organic vegetable production and at the same time to highlight and make an overview of the critical points of this agricultural system in Italy. The organic surface has been increasing in Italy in the past decades but rea- ched a plateau around the year 2000. In the past 2 years, the land destined to organic cultivation has sta- bilized around 1.0 million hectares and only 1% of this land is used to produce vegetable crops. Although Italy is still the first European producer of organic vegetables, in the last 2 years the cultivated area showed a reduction by 20%. There are several direc- ting principles that characterize organic farming. They include biodiversity, integration, sustainability, natural plant nutrition, natural pest management and integrity. Each of those principles needs to be understood, respected and well applied in order to perform a real organic farming and not only a \u201csubstitution agricultu- re\u201d based merely on the replacement of agrochemi- cals by organic compounds. One of the most impor- tant reason aiming consumers to buy organic pro- ducts is the perception that organic food has better nutritional and quality traits. The analysis of the scien- tific literature available showed that only few resear- ches were carried out following rigorous experimental criteria. In most of the experiments, only the nitrate content resulted clearly reduced by using organic pro- cedures. Vague and sometimes contradictory results has been reported on nutrients and vitamins content. Several authors suggest that more researches are needed to asses the real effects of organic techniques in terms of quality of the product, in order to get more scientific data on this topic which at moment seems to be more discussed than effectively studied