DEU

Agricola Ceglia Chi siamo

The Ceglia farm  has been a biodynamic company ever since 1986,  covering approximately 12 hectares of actinidia (kiwifruit), vineyards and olive groves.  Angelina and her husband Hein Knoll led the firm until 2011, firmly believing to be collaborators in Creation so that the Earth may once again be the wonderful and charitable mother earth that God has given to mankind.

Today Angelina is supported by her son Carlo and his wife Lucia, who manage the company with the same beliefs and feelings; for them biodynamic farming is a lifestyle choice, since they believe that the land’s fertility corresponds to the quality of food in the same way as the earth’s health corresponds to human health.

The company's choices are based on the concept of quality without this meaning renunciation of quantity:  indeed the experience gained over the years is that production has never diminished; on the contrary, often crop yields have been and are above average.

A fertile soil never lets you down!

Kiwi fruit, grapes and olive oil of an authentic and sincere flavor are the result of a successful collaboration between nature and our ecosystem based on the Steiner method ...and not least the love we put into our work!

The Ceglia farm was born in 1957 when my father, Vincenzo Ceglia, decided on his retirement to retreat in the countryside just outside Rome.
He decided to plant 14 hectares of DOC vineyards and cultivated it with the help of a farmer for 15 years, until he fell ill and passed the management of the farm to me to continue his work.  In 1982 my husband Hein Knoll and myself decided to go and live on the site and diversify the crops: gradually we planted 7 hectares of Kiwi, leaving four hectares of vineyards. Things were not going very well: the use of more and more chemical fertilizers and poisons caused products to be poor, despite all our efforts.
In our area some enthusiastic farmers practiced the Steiner method of biological agriculture. We met up with a very special person called Angelo Bertea, who guided us into this new experience.  We started to attend courses on biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophy given by professors Sbardelli and Marcello Lo Sterzo.

We understood it was crucial to heal the intoxicated soil and worked with confidence, sowing grassy meadows with 25 different types of herbs (in place of fertilizers), preparing and working the soil in a completely different way (hand dynamized), treating it extremely gently (as if it were our own skin) without ever turning it.

So year after year, we experienced a number of extraordinary changes taking place in our farm: a lush growth of plants, a growing number of creatures that started populating the soil and the land that started to change miraculously.

Analyzing and working the soil in a careful and better way, you notice that it is constantly enriched with humus and organic material and acts as a host for very useful microorganisms and earthworms:  the land becomes more fertile and returns to be the wealth to pass on to future generations.

Without the biodynamic method that brought new life to our land and to us, probably a small company like ours would have been closed by now.

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Angelina Ceglia