A group of friends, mostly originally from the Sannio Beneventano area, with a passion for agriculture and the environment. After a few years, the group has partially changed, but the passion and curiosity to seek approaches to agriculture that are sustainable and innovative remain.
Starting from the cooperative, we then became part of the founding group of the Sale della Terra Consortium (which deals with civil economy, cohesive agriculture and social activities) and we created an association, Gramigna ODV (which deals with European and national projects primarily intended to young people in the rural areas where we live)
Our motto is made up of a single word: "sustainability".
Environmental, economic and social sustainability.
By environmental sustainability we mean the research in the field of alternative agricultural
practices that eliminate chemical products (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc ...), invasive
processes, over-exploitation of land.
For economic sustainability, we mean the search for agricultural practices that, besides
respecting the environment and the genuineness of the products, are also profitable enough to guarantee a dignified future for us and for our cooperative.
Finally, for social sustainability we mean the ability of agricultural activities to bring benefits to disadvantaged people, to give social dignity to disabled people, migrants, drug addicts, prisoners.
We are a group of people from different backgrounds, including agricultural ones.
We are people who have experienced stories of emigration and who have decided to
return to our homeland and to the land.
Slowly, like the name of cooperative tells (Lentamente means slowly), we came back.
We came back one at a time, each for a different reason, each with a wealth of experiences
gained elsewhere.
After years spent away, we looked at our land with new eyes. It was no longer the empty land from which
we escaped to go far, to look for what was missing here. The land we once saw isolated, today it is a land
less contaminated by Western cultural homologation. Where once we saw backwardness today
we see ancient knowledge to preserve.
In the search for places that seemed to offer more opportunities for training and
employment, we have also had the opportunity to see more closely the contradictions
of this society and of our lifestyles. Too often the economic factor is considered the
most important aspect, to the point of making it acceptable
choices and habits that go to the detriment of the environment and of our physical
and psychosocial health.
The motivation that has brought us to come back, is to look for an alternative, for a
change in our little lifes. To find new solutions that have a long shadow on the future,
which can one day become good widespread practices.
Now this place suggests a future built with our hands. A future made of
experimentation of new farming practices and recovery of old practices that respect
the environment, the person and society.
This place is the fertile ground from which, with the idea of getting together, we try,
slowly, to find a path that leads to a better place.
Thus the cooperative Lentamente was born.
We are a group of dreamers who are trying, with the means available, to valorize a public good with sustainable agriculture, social agriculture and innovation in productions.
More than experience, we have the passion and unconsciousness of those who know that the route is very difficult, but not trying to follow it would have been even more difficult and painful.
We have come into contact with a great number of people, associations, public bodies that are in tune with our intent.
Many people helped us to start!
We want to be a shout of hope, a stone thrown into a pond,
a question mark for ourselves and for our territory.
