The Agricola Occhio Company consists of an estate located in the heart of the Ticino river valley and it covers an area of about seven hundred hectares in the Pavia Province.
Until the first half of the 1970s, it was a predominantly hunting production area, therefore at the service of hunting, and only in a small part of cereal grains.
With the establishment in 1974 of the Ticino Valley Natural Park in Lombardy (the largest river park in Europe with an area of about 91,000 hectares) within which the Company was included and the consequent ban on hunting within it, the Company focused its production towards the intensive cereal grains cultivation. While rice and maize were cultivated in the most fertile soils, the specialised poplar grove was in sandy soils or with little agronomic value soils.
Only after the mid-1990s, based on the Community regulations (CAP) and environmental programmes promoted by the Park Authority, the Company resumed its more systematic management of the large wooded and naturalistic area.
In fact, since 1998 all the areas occupied and intended for specialised poplar grove and all areas of poor agronomic value have been included in a reconversion programme with woody planting called “biomass” (a fifteen-year and twenty-year cycle). The timber obtained, appropriately ground (wood chips) is used by the thermoelectric power plants for the production of renewable source energy.
In 2017 the Company started the bureaucratic procedures for the conversion of all land to the biological system (EC Regulation No. 834/07).