The FoodSystem 5.0 Summer School kicks off today. Until June 21st, it will bring 20 researchers from around the world to Cilento, with the educational and operational goal of merging applied research, agroecological tradition, and digital innovation.
At the center of the Summer School “FoodSystem 5.0”, fundamental stage of the project “Il Borgo dei Mulini“, promoted by the Municipality of Sessa Cilento and by the Ministry of Culture, with the scientific direction of Rural Hack, there is community oliviculture, understood not as a simple agricultural technique, but as a territorial and cultural practice capable of generating shared value, resilience and care of common goods. A school that does not take place in an abstract classroom, but in the living landscape of the Cilento National Park, among secular olive groves, dry stone walls, terraces and millennia practices of collective management of the soil and of the water.
The entire experience will revolve around a key question: how can we make dialogue, in a coherent and effective way, technologies profoundly different from each other to support a regenerative agriculture, capable of caring for territories, enriching soils, enhancing landscapes and generating shared value?.
During the school, the participants will be called to experiment with the integration between archaic technologies like dry stone walls and IoT sensors for environmental monitoring. They will analyze latest generation oil mills capable of optimizing the organoleptic properties of the oil and analyzers with photometric technology for the measurement of polyphenols, indicators of nutraceutical and environmental quality. The use of distributed technologies like blockchain will be evaluated to build trust and certify not only the quality of the final product, but also the impacts generated on the soil, on human health and on the ecosystem.
The Summer School distinguishes itself by an immersive and action-oriented educational modality: learning by producing. It is not a simple learning path, but a collective experience aimed at the concrete production of solutions, prototypes, replicable models that make visible and practicable a new form of cooperative oliviculture.
The title itself of the school outlines a precise direction: not an opposition between tradition and innovation, but their radical integration. The “archaic technologies” (like dry stone walls, inscribed in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage) are not vestiges to be preserved, but tools still vital today for the sustainable management of the territory. In the same way, blockchain and IoT sensors are not hi-tech gadgets, but tools to return transparency, traceability and trust to local production processes, certifying not only the quality of the finished product (EVO oil), but also the entire ecological, social and cultural cycle that makes it possible: soil health, polyphenol content, cultivation techniques, impact on the landscape, cooperative governance.
In the course of the Summer School will be held, in the morning of Saturday June 21, at the headquarters of the Cooperativa Nuovo Cilento, in San Mauro Cilento, a moment of meeting to promote the new call SRD04 – Action 1, published by the Campania Region within the Complement of Rural Development 2023-2027. The call makes available 15 million euros for the recovery of dry stone walls, of terraces and of traditional hydraulic-agricultural arrangements, fundamental for the protection of the rural landscape and the agroecological resilience of territories.
Nicola Caputo, regional assessor for Agriculture, will participate in the meeting, together with representative figures of the territory like Antonello Di Gregorio, president of the Coop Nuovo Cilento, Giuseppe Cilento, founder of the cooperative and Alex Giordano, university professor and scientific director of Rural Hack. The meeting will be enriched by the presence and by the testimony of some master artisans of the dry stone wall, custodians of an ancient but still essential knowledge.
The Summer school of FoodSystem 5.0 is part of a cycle of the 4 seasonal schools on FoodSystem 5.0 which is inserted inside the project of cultural and social regeneration Il Borgo dei Mulini promoted by the Municipality of Sessa Cilento, situated in the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni National Park, and financed by the Ministry of Culture within the PNRR Intervention 2.1 “Attractiveness of Historic Villages”. The initiative involves various public and private actors and has the objective of transforming the territory into a laboratory of civic participation and into an incubator of business development in the cultural, tourism, environmental and agro-food sectors.
The project aims to contrast depopulation and to enhance local resources through the requalification of historical and naturalistic assets like the Valle dei Mulini and Palazzo Coppola, the enhancement of cultural and tourism infrastructures and the creation of new poles of social innovation, among which a rural hub for social and digital innovation animated by Rural Hack through the organization of 4 schools that follow the course of the seasons on the themes inspired by the concept of FoodSystem 5.0. The final goal is to make Sessa Cilento a model of attractor village, capable of combining tradition and innovation for a durable economic and social development and in close connection with other municipalities and virtuous realities that persist in the wide territory of the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni National Park.