The Centro Agricoltura Ambiente has been a dream that the scientific and political eclecticism of Giorgio Nicoli has been able to put into reality, and that remains a tangible testimony of its fleeting passage between us.
The Centro Agricoltura Ambiente (CAA) was born from a meeting between Professor Giorgio Celli and Giorgio Nicoli – of which the Center bears the name – who attended the course of Biological Control Techniques at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Bologna as a student held by Professor Celli.
The professor recounts: “At the end of the last lesson, with which I hoped for the advent of a new agriculture, more oriented towards biology than chemistry, which was then abused, the student Nicoli, who did not he never had a hair on his tongue, he raised his hand, and when I motioned for him to speak, he asked me what I meant to do, concretely, because my wish was translated into action. It was a challenge, and I replied that I had no collaborator , and even less funding for research: I was, so to speak, an unarmed prophet. I sent him back the ball, asking him, between the serious and the facetious, if he himself would be willing to give me a hand. mo, and so did many other students, some from San Giovanni in Persiceto, his friends and destined to become mine too. Together, we developed a program of biological control of harmful insects, as a first step in making agroecology, and we decided to start operating – Giorgio Nicoli and his “musketeers” as thesis students – in some orchards in the lower Bologna area “.
In November 1986 the Administrators of the Province of Bologna and the Municipalities of the agricultural area n. 5 (Municipalities of: Calderara di Reno, Crevalcore, Sala Bolognese, San Giovanni in P., Sant’Agata Bolognese), together with Prof. Celli, inaugurate the headquarters of the CAA in Crevalcore, subsequently forming an no profit Association.
From those times CAA has come a long way, growing both from the structural and scientific point of view, up to, in 1992, also to the constitution of the limited liability company Centro Agricoltura e Ambiente Srl, for the supply of services in the sector of environmental protection.
Today the Center, true to its name, carries out studies and research and develops projects that, also through the collaboration between public and private, enhance the territory and agricultural production.