La Fattoria Di Vaira has started a collaboration with a small German company Sativa which has always dealt exclusively with the development of professional seeds aimed at those who practice organic and biodynamic agriculture. It is an aspect to which attention must be paid: the large seed companies are less and less interested in the quality of their products, making profit logics unrelated to human health and the environment prevail. Most farmers are forced to use hybrid seeds, because they are often the only ones available or because the market does not value productions that have variability in size, shape, or that present diversity in quality. It is therefore important that companies such as Ecor and Fattoria Di Vaira commit themselves to the enhancement and improvement of non-hybrid seeds of ancient seeds and their selection, to arrive at a production of seeds that restores dignity to the work of selection that man has operated from always in agriculture.

Durum wheat
The collaboration of EcorNaturaSì with Peter Kunz is articulated in a research project for the development of non-hybrid biological varieties for the Italian territory. Peter Kunz with his Getreidezuchtung foundation Peter Kunz has been working on the selection of new non-hybrid varieties suitable for organic and biodynamic agriculture for 30 years, but he has always dealt with crops for northern Europe. The sharing in Italy of the Seminare il Futuro event, which he invented and disseminated, and his visits to Di Vaira for the same initiative, made Peter want to work with a typically Mediterranean culture. Thus was born the project: "Constitution of new varieties of durum wheat for biological and biodynamic systems". Peter Kunz, Luca Sartorato (Ecornaturasi director for the agricultural project) and Di Vaira identified technical partners in Italy who had expertise and genetic material from which to start.

The general objective of the project is the creation of durum wheat varieties suitable for the cultivation conditions of organic, biodynamic and low-tech agricultural systems. The new varieties will have to be more responsive to the specific cultivation needs of the aforementioned systems and present qualitative characteristics adhering to the needs of the market and the consumer, in order to enhance the typical productions of the main Italian areas with a cereal vocation. The project also aims to refine cultivation techniques with low environmental impact, with particular attention to those that most influence the yield and the technological and nutritional quality of the grain (fertilization, containment of biotic adversities and weeds). The experimentation should go on for at least 3 years, at the end of which we hope to be able to identify registrable varieties which all farmers will be able to use.