7/27/2019 Warm Acquaintance With Rural Poland - Greece
Impact
1/1
A warm acquaintance with rural Poland
Another wonderful experience of contact with the natural
environment and eating habits, but
also - as always - an experience of approach between European
citizens from countries as far
away as Greece and Finland, or Portugal and Estonia , was the
recent, fifth in a row, trip by
OIKIPA members under the European program Foodprint.eu.
The place hosting us was the capital of Poland Warsaw and its
rural periphery.
The members of the organizations involved in the program,
visited farms featuring multiple
activities, from simple fruit and vegetable production to
maintenance of a Botanical Garden,
with a built in traditional hotel with areas for environmental
education, and a herbal product
factory. From OIKIPA, Giorgos Kanellis and Odysseas Xerizotis
were the attendees.
In a farm located about 140 kilometers away from Warsaw, members
of the multinational
company of Foodprint, had the opportunity to taste a variety of
recipes with potatoes, soups
(a meal Poles excel at!) and fruits of organic production.
An interesting experience, despite the rain, was a visit to
potato field during the time of
harvest. The harvest was done in a traditional way, with horses
plowing the field and villagers,
most of them being women dressed in traditional costumes,
collecting potatoes, a
fundamental agricultural and nutritional item in Poland.
Noticeable was the visit to a Museum of Agricultural Machinery,
where the famous Polish
URSUS tractors, produced during the first half of the 20th
century, coexisted with improvised
tools out of wood and iron, made by the farmers themselves for
all kinds of rural work.
A really noteworthy place was the Botanical Garden ZIOLONY
ZAKATEK, near the village of
Koryciny.
It is truly a miracle, by and large due to the creativity of a
single man, an agronomist who,
beginning just out of the love of herbs he inherited from his
grandmother, went so far as to
create an exceptional botanical garden measuring tens of acres,
which is both a field of herb
production and preservation, as well as a host of recreational
activities and environmental
education. Next to that garden there is a traditional
guesthouse, hosting many visitors,
especially school groups. Most importantly, there lies a factory
that produces and packages
herbs of all kinds. The Dary Natury factory, utilizing a broad
network of locals who collect or
produce useful herbs, reached the point of employing 80 workers.
The herbs are cleaned,
their useful parts (leaves, fruit, roots) are sorted, dried and
packaged to be sent not only to
Poland, but also in other markets, especially in Germany.
It is a great achievement, grounded in the passion, the love for
nature and the organizationaland entrepreneurial skills of its
creator, an example of sustainable development offering a
wide range of production and employment opportunities to the
local community, and it
deserves to constitute a model for our own country, one that is
arguably wealthier than
Poland in generally useful herbs.
George Kanellis
