Lentamente Cooperativa

We are a group of friends, mostly from the Sannio Benevento area (assisted by a Casertano, an Irpina, a Cremasca and a Polish woman) with a passion for agriculture and the environment.

We are a group of people coming from different experiences, also agricultural. We are people who have lived stories of emigration and who have decided to return to their homeland and to the land. Slowly we are back.

In scattered order. Each one following paths that have met in this land, each with a baggage of experiences made elsewhere. After years spent far away we looked at our land with new eyes. It was no longer the empty land that pushed us to go far away to look for what was missing here. The land that we once saw isolated today is a land less contaminated by Western cultural homologation, where we once saw backwardness today we see ancient knowledge to preserve.

In the search for places that seemed to offer more opportunities for education and employment we also had the opportunity to see more closely the contradictions of this society and our lifestyles. All too often the economic factor is considered the most important aspect to the point of making acceptable choices and habits that are at the expense of the environment and our physical and psychosocial health.

The motivation that pushed us to come back is to look for an alternative in our small way, a change of course, new solutions that have a long shadow on the future, that can one day become widespread good practices. Now this place suggests a future built with our own hands.

A future made of experimentation with new agricultural practices and the recovery of old practices that respect the environment, the person, society. This place is the fertile ground from which the idea of getting together to try, slowly, to find a road that leads to a better place.

Thus the Società Cooperativa Agricola Lentamente was born. We are a group of dreamers who are trying, with the means at their disposal, to enhance public goods in the perspective of sustainable agriculture, welcoming people in difficulty and innovative in production and methods.

More than experience, we have at our disposal the passion and unconsciousness of those who know that the path is very difficult, but not trying to walk it would have been even more difficult and painful. Our motto is composed of a single word: "sustainability".environmental, economic and social sustainability.

By environmental sustainability we mean field research into alternative agricultural practices to those widespread today that have a significant impact on nature for the use of chemical compounds (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. ...), invasive processing, over-exploitation of land.

By economic sustainability we mean the search for agricultural practices that, in addition to respecting the environment and the genuineness of the products, are also profitable enough to ensure a decent future for members and our cooperative.

Finally, by social sustainability we mean the ability of agricultural activities to bring benefits to disadvantaged people, to give social dignity to disabled people through activities that promote the right to health, understood as psychophysical well-being, promoting awareness and information of families and society, integrating without homologation or assimilation.

The contact with the earth refers to a contact with ourselves, a deep contact, bringing balance and well-being. We have come into contact with a great number of people, associations, bodies that are in tune with our intentions.

With surprise we have discovered that in the territory already before us many other people have been interested in these issues. There are processes of social transformation already underway that work underground, that are not visible to distracted eyes and that will soon be new good practices spread. We are trying with the help of those who are supporting us in a variety of ways.

We want to be a shout of hope, a stone thrown into a pond, a question mark for ourselves and for our territory.