A group of young people returned to the depopulated rural north of Italy after spending years abroad. For them, this was a political act. Since 2024, they have been engaging local youth in an educational farm and courses on agroecology. Their early success in motivating youth to pursue farming counters the narrative that rural life means decline, sacrifice or failure, and provides an alternative vision for the future of Veneto.
A landscape of departure and return
In Marostica, a small town in the foothills of the province of Vicenza in the northeastern Veneto region of Italy, the landscape is shaped by small-scale agriculture. This town hosts our organisation GÒ CARO, and the place where we have our farm is still known locally as la strada del fango – the ‘mud road’ – because streams from the surrounding hills converge there, carrying water and sediment after each rain.
Yet this landscape, once intensely cultivated and inhabited, is now marked by depopulation. The average age in our area is well above 60. Young people leave for study, work and social life in the cities and rarely return. Fields turn to scrub and forest, terraces collapse, and houses remain empty. Some people never come back. Others, after years abroad, return.
For me and several other young people from the region who had spent years living, working and studying abroad, returning was not simply a logistical choice. It was a political act. After discovering agroecology elsewhere, we felt both the need and the responsibility to return to our place of origin and to resist the narrative that rural life means decline, sacrifice or failure. This was a countercultural step, as Francesco, now co-founder and president of GÒ CARO expressed: “I spent years abroad trying to escape. I never expected to return to Veneto. Italy felt like a failed system, and coming back here was the last thing on my mind.”
Reimagining rural spaces
At the end of 2024, as four young people from the Vicenza foothills whose lives had taken different routes away from their hometowns, we returned and started our initiative, GÒ CARO. Some of us had spent years abroad, others had stayed closer to home, but all of us shared the feeling that something essential was being lost in our rural territory: people, knowledge, relationships and confidence in the future.
Our core motivation was to create a space where people could gather, talk, learn and practice knowledge related to rural life
We found each other through long-standing personal connections – friendships, family ties and shared histories – and through a common dissatisfaction with the idea that leaving was the only possible way forward. We came back from different experiences across Europe, from environmental volunteering to international cooperation, self-production gardening, and academic studies in agroecology. These trajectories shaped the way we imagined GÒ CARO.
Agroecology, for us, is not only a set of farming techniques, but a framework that allows environmental regeneration, social inclusion and cultural memory to be addressed together. Our core motivation was to create a space where people could gather, talk, learn and practice knowledge related to rural life, regenerative agriculture, inclusion and the climate crisis – themes that are deeply interconnected, yet rarely explored together in rural settings.
We wanted to open a place where these conversations could happen outside academic institutions and market-driven contexts, grounded instead in everyday practice. We deliberately chose to be a non-profit, placing education and community before production and sales.
Building our own educational farm
Our activities take place primarily at Togonegro, a two-hectare educational micro family farm located along the old mud road. The land was purchased by my father about ten years ago, but remained largely unused. None of our parents come from farming backgrounds. When GÒ CARO was created, my father decided to give us creative freedom on the land, so that it could finally begin to function as a place of experimentation, learning and collective use.
The farm sits in a small hydrological basin where several streams converge, creating fertile soils but also recurring water management challenges. This physical condition has shaped our approach from the beginning, turning the land itself into a living classroom where questions of soil, water, climate and care are not abstract, but daily realities.
One of the first concrete steps we took was working on the family garden, an area of about 900 square meters that had been managed conventionally for years, with regular tractor use, tillage and external inputs. My father also gave us the possibility to use his tools and equipment. While this support was essential from a practical point of view, it did not come with full confidence in our approach. The garden is still watched with a certain skepticism by both my father and neighbouring farmers.
The surrounding landscape is dominated by fruit orchards – especially cherries – as well as vineyards and olive groves, typically managed in monocultures with fertilisers and pesticides. Our regenerative experiments, therefore, appear unusual. At the same time, social activities unfolding around the garden have sparked curiosity, opening informal conversations and creating bridges that would not have been possible through technical debates alone.
The transition of the farm meant moving from conventional to regenerative management. In practice, this involved reducing tillage, rebuilding soil structure through organic matter, experimenting with intercropping, and allowing spontaneous biodiversity to return. Working on land that carries the memory of conventional management has been an important learning process.
For instance, we immediately had to confront soil compaction caused by years of tractor use. We adopted a market garden approach based on permanent, raised no-dig beds, continuously helping the soil regain structure and life. Experiments like this help others understand that agroecological transitions are often slow, imperfect and deeply contextual.
Learning agroecology as a social process
Alongside field work, we began organising small workshops focused on rural knowledge, including foraging, willow weaving and water management in permaculture. The participants are primarily young people under 30 from Marostica and neighbouring municipalities in the Alpine foothills of Vicenza. Some grew up in farming families, some studied environmental or social sciences, some returned after spending time abroad, and others arrived simply out of curiosity, searching for a concrete way to reconnect with the land.
While the majority of participants are young, older neighbours also bring fragments of historical knowledge
While the majority of participants are young, older neighbours also join our activities, often drawn by familiarity with the place or personal connections. Their presence brings fragments of historical knowledge about the territory, sometimes shared explicitly, other times through informal conversations and observations. Children participate mainly through our school collaborations and educational farm visits, which represent an important bridge between formal education and lived rural experience.
Whose knowledge counts?
Our activities raised an important question within the community: where does knowledge come from, and who is considered legitimate to teach it? In the village, much traditional rural knowledge remains, but it is mostly held by older generations. Many elders never passed it on to younger people, seeing it as a reminder of a past associated with poverty and hard rural life – something they hoped younger generations could escape by leaving.
As a result, involving elders directly as workshop facilitators has been difficult. Many do not feel entitled or willing to teach. Yet, as we encounter them every day around the association, they continue to teach us a great deal informally, through their stories, observations and comments.
In this way, even when our workshops are led by facilitators from nearby areas and target young people, they often become a catalyst for intergenerational knowledge sharing: a space where local elders observe from the margins, sometimes intervening, sometimes simply recognising familiar gestures and practices.
Workshops are announced mainly through informal channels and require simple association membership. This model is intentional: it frames the farm not as a private service, but as a shared space shaped by the people who pass through it.
Our lessons learnt on attracting rural youth
For nearly the entire first year, these workshops were paid for by participants. Without funding, asking for a contribution was the only way to cover basic costs such as materials, facilitators’ fees and shared meals. This model allowed us to start, but it also limited participation, especially in a rural context where distances are long and motivation needs to be high. In autumn 2025, after securing our first European grant, we shifted to offering fully free agroecology courses for local youth. The change was immediate: participation increased, the diversity of attendees broadened, and the space became more accessible to those who had previously hesitated.
Over time, we have learned that attracting young people in rural areas requires more than offering interesting content. What has worked best is building collaborations with other local initiatives and individuals, which have increased both our visibility and credibility, especially in a context where new projects led by young people are often met with scepticism.
A clear and consistent social media presence has also played an important role, helping us reach people who might not otherwise encounter agroecology in their daily lives. Another key learning has been designing workshops as multi-day pathways rather than single events. When activities are structured as processes, participants are more likely to commit, build relationships and feel part of something that extends beyond a one-off experience.
We learned these lessons after some approaches proved ineffective. One-off workshops rarely generated lasting engagement, especially when they required a significant time investment to reach a rural location. High participation costs were also a clear barrier, reinforcing existing inequalities and excluding those without economic flexibility.
Finally, activities that lacked a clear connection to rural knowledge or local practices tended to attract less interest, underscoring the importance of learning being rooted in the specific territory where it takes place.
Administrative obstacles
One of our first obstacles was institutional mistrust. Not just the neighbours, but also local administrations were sceptical of us: a group of young people promoting agroecology through a non-profit association, in a context where work is usually equated with profit. This scepticism emerged early on when we tried to propose collaborations with the municipality. We often had the impression that more traditional associations – especially those composed of retirees and perceived as ‘safer’ and historically rooted – were considered more reliable interlocutors, while our proposal sounded unfamiliar and perhaps too political for a conservative local leadership.
Rather than trying to address this barrier and the authorities directly, we chose to continue on our path and let facts speak for themselves. Over time, the growing number of participants and regular activities became our main source of legitimacy, both towards institutions and within the local community, including villagers and families of younger participants.
Another challenge was bureaucracy. Managing an association in Italy requires time, documentation, and adherence to legal requirements. As hiring consultants was financially infeasible for us, we joined ARCI, a national network that provides legal, insurance, and administrative support. This crucial support allowed us to contain the administrative workload and focus our energies on organising activities on the ground. Support structures such as ARCI are not secondary: they make grassroots initiatives sustainable over time.
Growing social biodiversity
One visible result is the number and diversity of young people involved in our activities. Today, around 30 members are actively engaged in the association. By ‘active’, we mean that they do not only attend workshops, but take part in assemblies, help organise activities, propose new workshops, and contribute to shaping the direction of GÒ CARO. Beyond this core group, several hundred people have been reached through workshops and public events over the past year.
The growing number of participants and regular activities became our main source of legitimacy
However, the most important results are not numerical. We have seen young people who were planning to leave begin to imagine themselves staying. Returned students connected with local peers who never left, reducing the sense of isolation on both sides. Elders shared knowledge of wild plants or irrigation systems from “when everything was different.” These interactions create social biodiversity, which is as important as ecological biodiversity in sustaining rural life. The feedback on what people gained after a biodiversity workshop illustrates this shift:
- “Making connections and building a network.”
- “The beauty that can emerge from meeting others.”
- “The skills I gained and the desire to actually change things in the Vicenza area.”
- “A sense of community and a rediscovery of the roots of my own territory — culturally, generationally and geographically.”
Agroecology as a meeting point
It is still too early to say what truly keeps young people in rural areas. The association is young, and so are we. What we have learned so far, however, is that accessibility and participation in knowledge sharing are key. Making workshops free is not just an act of generosity; it is a strategy for territorial justice. When access is ensured, agroecology becomes a meeting point for different forms of knowledge, backgrounds and experiences.
Finally, we learned that agency is a central element in agroecology. Creating an association of people who share a vision of the world and who relate to land in different ways – by cultivating it, studying it or simply caring for it – generates a self-reinforcing process. People meet, work with their hands, talk, exchange knowledge, and gradually propose new ideas, topics and participants. Over time, these conversations inevitably become political, because food and land-use choices are political. Acting collectively allows people to move from informal exchange to public voice, eventually engaging with local institutions as a cohesive and determined group.
As social permaculture trainer Maria Antonietta Zuccalà told participants during a workshop: “Take responsibility. In every field of your life, take your responsibility. It’s okay to make mistakes, to change path. But take your responsibility.”
Perspectives for the future
Looking ahead, we aim to consolidate our educational work while strengthening pathways for young people to engage in agriculture beyond workshops. One concrete step in this direction will be to create a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model at the farm. This will allow members to share the risks and joys of cultivation, contributing to fieldwork and receiving seasonal produce in return.
In parallel, we are exploring collaborations with universities and research centers to turn our agroecological practices into a living field for scientific observation and experimentation. Transitioning soils from conventional to regenerative management, monitoring biodiversity recovery, or testing low-input cropping systems could generate useful data for researchers and farmers while simultaneously strengthening the legitimacy and visibility of farmer-led innovation.
We nurture not only the desire to remain in the territory, but to care for it deeply
More broadly, our vision for youth in Veneto is rooted in continuity and belonging. We believe that offering multiple entry points into the association – from early experiences through the educational farm, to active participation in workshops and collective events, and eventually to shared responsibility within a CSA – can nurture not only the desire to remain in the territory, but to care for it deeply.
Through this gradual involvement, young people can imagine livelihoods that respect the value and fragility of the land while recognising their responsibility for caring for it. In this sense, agroecology becomes not just a set of practices, but a long-term relationship between people, place and future generations.
Author: Anna Caberlon (28) is from Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto region and one of the founders of GÒ CARO. Her work and research are driven by an ongoing search for ways of living that are lighter on the planet and more attentive to relationships between people, land and ecosystems. Contact: anna.caberlon@gmail.com
This article is part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
