Confagricoltura Piemonte reports that, due to the particularly hot and dry seasonal trend, in some areas of Piedmont, relief irrigation for crops has significantly increased.
The crops most subjected to water stress - explain the Confagricoltura Piemonte technicians - are corn, tomato, soy, sorghum, horticultural, beet, stable and alternating meadows, clovers, alfalfa and weeds, sorghum, beans and open field vegetables, fruit trees, remontant strawberries and small fruits.
" Water - underlines the president of Confagricoltura Piemonte Enrico Allasia - is a precious commodity that must be used responsibly. In recent decades, agriculture has reduced water consumption by almost 30%, committing itself to adopting sustainable management models," such as precision irrigation . Today we urgently need to restructure the water networks and create new reservoirs: in our country, in fact, only 11% of rainwater is retained " .
For Confagricoltura it is necessary to restore and renew an old infrastructural network, with a high dispersion rate, without forgetting the importance of improving the use of waste water, which is one of the most important challenges of the circular economy.
" We must make the most of the opportunity of the Recovery Plan - explains the director of Confagricoltura Piemonte Ercole Zuccaro - to mitigate the effects of climate change, creating the infrastructure necessary to manage the water resource, bearing in mind that in the coming years the increase of temperatures will further aggravate water shortages ".
Confagricoltura specifies that the primary sector is the one that will be most affected by drought and for this reason it is becoming increasingly important to be able to accumulate rainwater, in order to be able to use it in times of shortage. It is necessary to distinguish between the water withdrawn and the actual consumption: the primary sector is the only economic sector that produces respecting the water resource, because that used in irrigation - Confagricoltura recalls - does not escape from the natural hydrological cycle but is returned to the system. environmental, downstream of the production processes.
