Collection: Una Garlanda
There are fifteen thousand trees growing in the rice paddies of Rovasenda, Vercelli. Most rice farmers would call this a disaster. The Stocchi family calls it the plan. Una Garlanda's Metodo Stocchi is the only example of agroforestry in European rice cultivation — eighty kilometers of tree-lined rows that shade, shelter, and restore the fields. No chemicals of any kind, not even those organic certification would permit. Official custodians of eight ancient rice varieties. Twelve rices, three rice pastas, all packaged in paper. This is what rice looks like when someone takes it completely seriously.
Piedmont
In the quiet rice lands of northern Piedmont, Una Garlanda has chosen a rarer path, one shaped not by shortcuts or intervention, but by patience, observation and deep fidelity to the natural world.
This is not simply a rice producer. It is a place where cultivation becomes stewardship, where the field is treated as a living system, and where excellence begins long before harvest. At Una Garlanda, rice is grown with an almost radical respect for balance: between soil and water, tradition and innovation, productivity and beauty.
What sets them apart is not only their devotion to organic agriculture, but the extraordinary depth of that devotion. Over the years, they have pursued a vision that reaches beyond the conventional boundaries of organic farming, seeking ever more natural, more intelligent, and more harmonious ways to cultivate the land. The result is a method that feels both innovative and deeply ancestral — a way of farming that listens before it acts.
At the heart of their identity is the Stocchi Method, a pioneering approach born from years of careful study and direct experience in the field. Rather than relying on force, this system works with the rhythms of nature itself. Grasses are grown, laid down, and transformed into a living mulch that protects and nourishes the rice, creating an environment where fertility arises from the field’s own vitality. It is an approach of remarkable elegance: one that allows cultivation without synthetic chemicals, and even without the fertilization commonly permitted in organic farming.
Yet Una Garlanda’s achievement is larger than technique alone. Their world is one of biodiversity, heritage, and regeneration. Trees and shrubs surround the rice fields. Historic varieties are preserved with care. Research, ecology, and agricultural memory are woven together into a single philosophy — one that sees the farm not as a machine, but as a landscape to be protected and renewed.
For Terra Sacra, Una Garlanda embodies a kind of Italian excellence that is increasingly rare: cultured, visionary, and rooted in the land. Their rice tells a story not only of flavor, but of conscience of what becomes possible when agriculture is guided by intelligence, humility, and love for the living world.
This is rice with provenance.
Rice with purpose.
Rice grown not against nature, but in profound conversation with it.