The Anxiety That Became a Calling

Edmondo Soffritti did not grow up dreaming of becoming a regenerative farmer. He grew up on La Petrosa, the family land his grandparents bought in the 1950s, along with the 19th-century farmhouse that still anchors the farm today.

For three generations, the Soffritti family did what every farm in Cilento did: produce maize and wheat to feed the buffalo herds that anchor the region’s dairy economy. While the fields looked productive, yields became increasingly unstable each season, costs rose, and the land grew more exhausted. “We were farming, but we were no longer cultivating with nature. We were cultivating against it,” Edmondo explains.

In 2014, the local cooperative invited Colombian agronomist Jairo Restrepo Rivera to give a talk. It was the first time anyone in Cilento had described the soil as a living organism and farmers as custodians of life rather than operators in an industrial chain.

“It felt as if he was describing exactly what I had been sensing for years but couldn’t yet put into words,” Edmondo recalls.

That meeting set Edmondo on the regenerative path. “It felt like a summons,” he explains. “It grew slowly, rooted in doubt, curiosity, and hope.”

Working With Nature Again

La Petrosa sits in the heart of the Cilento National Park, a UNESCO-recognized territory in southern Italy known for its biodiversity and rural traditions and, in recent decades, for depopulation and abandoned farms. Edmondo runs the farm with his family.

Their transition to regenerative agriculture happened step by step. They extended rotations and reintroduced native cereals, legumes, and cover crops that feed the soil year-round. They moved from intensive tillage to no-till farming. Earthworms returned. The soil darkened. Water started infiltrating the ground again instead of running off.

They also began bringing animals back. Native breeds of cattle and goats were integrated into an agro-silvopastoral system that rotates through pastures, crops, and woodland. Their bedding, mixed with chestnut waste from forestry companies a few kilometres away, becomes the compost that fertilizes everything growing at La Petrosa in what Edmondo calls his “virtuous circular economy.”

Today, 100% of the farm’s 60 hectares are under regenerative management and certified organic: 1,700 olive trees, around 400 fruit trees, fields of heritage grains and legumes, market garden vegetables, five cows, fifty goats, and twenty chickens.

Every raw material is transformed in on-farm laboratories into olive oil, caciocavallo and caciocotta cheeses, heritage-grain pasta, and jarred legumes, then sold through the farm shop, local farmers’ markets, restaurants, and cooperatives.

Building Networks & Driving Change

Edmondo strongly believes in the power of relationships to drive change, which is why he co-founded Rareche Cilento, a regional network of regenerative farms.

He was also part of founding the National Association of Producers in Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (AOR), where he now sits on the council. He serves as vice-president of Cooperativa Nuovo Cilento, the largest cooperative in Campania, and as a councillor of the Cilento Organic District.

La Petrosa is an EIT Food Lighthouse Farm, and in 2025 the farm received second prize at the EIT Food Ceres Awards. Every month, at least four visiting groups come through the gates: farmers, students, researchers, schoolchildren, and institutional representatives.

The doors stay open because the obstacles to this kind of farming are mostly cultural and systemic, not technical. “The food system, even at the most granular level, is designed for industrial products to outcompete food that is produced locally and regeneratively,” he says.

That is why he is convening a national working group to address the legislative barriers that still slow regenerative agriculture in Italy.

Cultivating Relationships, Not Just Crops

What makes La Petrosa is its focus on the human dimension. Decisions are made through daily dialogue between people who share values rooted in the land. The family does not just cultivate cereals and legumes; they cultivate relationships with the territory, the community, researchers, other farmers, and visitors who come to know them through farmhouse hospitality, Cilento cooking, and workshops. “Agritourism helped us finance a large part of La Petrosa’s transition,” Edmondo openly admits.

This openness and devotion to sharing knowledge define everything at La Petrosa. The farm is a place where people from all walks of life come together to learn, exchange ideas, and discover that regenerative agriculture is not merely possible; it is necessary and deeply rewarding.

An Incubator for the Next Generation of Cilento

Two concrete projects sit on Edmondo’s desk for the next ten to twenty years. The first is Italy’s first farm incubator: new entrant farmers, alone or in collectives, would receive a portion of his land to test their own farm business models in real conditions, along with a stipend, access to mentoring, and shared machinery. It is a direct response to the rural depopulation that has hollowed out so many Cilento villages.

The second is a shared cooperative processing unit for the entire area, where farmers can pool the equipment needed to convert raw products into sellable goods without leaving the territory.

Being recognized among the Top 50 Farmers matters to Edmondo less for the title than for the reach. He sees it as proof that a kind of farming rooted in relationships, local know-how, and regeneration can work, can be replicated elsewhere, and can open the door to a European community of farmers rethinking production systems together.

“My farm is always on the journey of regeneration: it is a never-ending process, constantly evolving,” he says. “Our doors are open to whoever is interested.”

Written by Top 50 Farmers and Helianthi Psaropoulou Heilmann