Our history dates back to 1957, when my father Rosario Gibilisco, a simple blue-collar worker, but with a great love for the land, purchased a plot of about 5000 square meters in which he often invested and sacrificed his salary and the limited free time available. He and my mother, Stella, loved working the land and spent any time they had available planting, watering and growing fruits and vegetables that they would pick and cook for the family every day. One of my earliest memories is eating oranges while walking among the trees with my father - To this day, every morning I eat about 20 or 25 oranges and mandarins for breakfast. When Valeria and I got married we went to live on the farm in Monasteri where we had all our children and have been here ever since. As a family, we spend a lot of time together, even each one of us gets on with their tasks on a daily basis, we come together around the table every evening for dinner and we get to share things or just chat about the day. We don’t go out at night much, also because we rise very early in the morning and we tend to go to bed early as well. We live a simple life but one that is filled with pride and passion for our work and I think this gets reflected in the quality of our products.
__Angelo and his son Renato Gibilisco__
Although Renato and I are involved full time in the running of the farm, we also have our seasonal team of eight pickers that work with us during harvesting, as well as Sara and Valeria, my daughter and wife who work more on the administration and accounting side.
Renato and I tend to plan tasks on a daily basis. Every morning we go around the land for a daily inspection, we check that everything is in order, we look for possible intervention to the trees and plants, we decide if the soil needs weeding, treatments, irrigation, etc. When it is time for harvesting we set a weekly plan and we organise the work with the rest of the team until all of the fruits are picked, boxed and shipped.
Renato strongly believes in biodynamic agriculture and is studying its processes. He is now preparing the land for cultivation in BIODYNAMIC. When he graduated from high school he went travelling around Europe and stayed in Germany for five years. When he decided to go back to university and returned to Sicily, one afternoon he came with me for an inspection in one of the plots and he stopped and said: “Dad, I am not going to university, I am going to work with you on the land and we are going to turn our cultivation into biodynamic!”.
We are happy to be part of CrowdFarming as we want to share our farm life with CrowdFarmers around the world and we want to give them the opportunity to adopt our trees and have a closer first-hand experience with farming, agriculture and nature.