ProgettoSterpaia

SSA Progetto Sterpaia was born in 2013 with the goal of settingsome agricultural practices on our territory to improve the quality of soil, producing and processing high nutritional quality food.

The alliance between producers and consumers is fundamental to grant everybody a better future: protecting biodiversity does not mean shutting it in a display case, but it is the first step to change the pace of our economy, which too often tends to flatten, standardise, use corruption and violence against humans and the environment they live in.

Progetto Sterpaia, with the collaboration of Università degli Studi di Firenze, has chosen to grow traditional varieties of wheat (the so-called ancient grains) through organic farming, to grant our customers highly digestible products with low levels of gluten and a wide selection of proteins and vitamins, essential for human health. The flours we obtain from such grains, thanks to the stone grinding process, have all their main elements intact, for example the germ and its unsaturated oils, and represent a whole, nutrient and digestible food.

Have you ever thought about the fact that more and more people manifest gluten intolerance nowadays? The reason has to do with the genetic modification that some kinds of wheat have undergone in order to become more productive, which have caused, at the same time, a raise in their gluten percentage. If we add the fact that food industry submits grains to a refining process which drains their fibre, vitamin and mineral salt share, it is easy to understand how the regular consumption of such wheat introduces an excessive amount of gluten and an insufficient quantity of nutrients.
The result is a general lower tolerance to gluten even in people who do not suffer from coeliac disease. In Italy we can find such disturbs in 3 million people, the 5% of the population (coeliac disease patients are 500.000) and this number is going to grow unless we change our food habits in the next few years.

If we exclude the possibility of cancelling cereals from our diet for ever, the only solution is to go back to cultivation and processing methods which respect nature and consumers’ health.

At Progetto Sterpaia we came together in order to convey this message in a clear way: we hope more and more farmers, artisans and citizens who are concerned with such themes join us. Our project of short supply chain has come to the final step with the realisation of Le Pietre mill: now everything is ready, in Val di Cornia, to welcome a future of nature and well-being.