On a July afternoon, a municipal water truck billowed with dust as it arrived at Liborio Mangiapane’s farm in southern Sicily. Some of the precious water was being transferred to a small tank on the tractor that Mangiapane’s son uses to fill the mangers for his 250 cows and sheep, but by tomorrow all 10,000 liters of it will be gone.
A severe drought after a year with little rain, combined with record high temperatures, has wiped out much of the region’s hay and stretched farmers to the limits. For Mangiapane, every day is a struggle to find water, involving frantic phone calls, long trips to distant wells and long waits for city water trucks.
They fear that if there is no rain by the end of August, they will have to sell their livestock.
“We’re experiencing extreme heat right now and the animals need a lot of water,” Mangiapane said. “We’re constantly worried that they’re not going to suffer, but we also want the opportunity to wash ourselves.”
Feed production across Sicily fell by 70% in a year marked by the wettest weather in more than two decades, according to Italy’s main agricultural association, Coldiretti, and main water sources have been nearly depleted, forcing authorities to severely ration water.
The region is one of Italy’s breadbaskets, producing 20 percent of the country’s durum wheat, used in pasta. Coldiretti estimates that the drought could reduce the island’s production by up to 70 percent, making the island more dependent on imports. Olive oil and peach production could be hit by the year’s drought, which will continue into the coming months. The heat wave brought forward the grape harvest by nearly four weeks, but so far there has been no damage.
In May, the government declared a state of emergency for Sicily and allocated 20 million euros ($21.7 million) to buy water trucks, dig new wells and repair leaking water pipes. Coldiretti donated 1.5 million tons of animal feed, and the regional government subsidized farmers who were forced to buy hay from third parties.
Rainfall has fallen by up to 60 percent in parts of Sicily, according to the meteorology department of the Italian National Research Council, and the region’s weather service reported that temperatures had been higher than normal throughout June, with many areas frequently reaching above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Farmers have watched as basins, lakes and ponds that were once reliable water sources disappear.
Luca Cammarata watched his sheep search for water on his farm in Caltanissetta province, one of the hardest-hit areas in Sicily, where little rain has fallen in a year, reservoirs are nearly empty and if rain doesn’t come soon, water will have to be pumped from wells and aquifers to dangerously high levels.
“We’ve never had a shortage of water in this little basin,” Cammarata said. The sheep were always searching for water, ringing bells wherever it was. Soon, they’ll have to retreat to the barn to avoid the hot sun.
Nearby Lake Pergusa, once a refuge for migratory birds, is a natural basin covering an area of 1.4 square kilometers (0.5 square miles) with an average depth of about 2 meters. It now resembles a puddle.
The situation was the same on Mangiapane’s land, a little over an hour northwest, near the city of Cammarata. From his barn, Mangiapane peered out at a large pond where rainwater normally collects to water his livestock, but which was now “as dry as a football field.”
August marks the start of the winter rains typically, said Mangiapane, a longtime rancher and known as a vocal advocate of natural grazing and small-scale cheese-making over industrial-scale farming.
“I hope it will be a little better than last year because this year we had to work so hard financially and in terms of human resources with zero profit,” he said. “We worked all year with zero profit. We have no wheat or fodder for our cattle. Neither the local nor the central government has taken any strong measures.”
Local authorities are rushing to open new wells, repair desalination plants, and supply water, and in late July the Italian Navy’s first tanker ship arrived in Licata, delivering 12 million liters (3.2 million gallons) of water to the hardest-hit areas.
Local water authorities have severely restricted water distribution to the nearly one million residents, with the hardest-hit areas only getting water for two to four hours a week. Sicily’s water pipes have lost up to 60 percent of their water, according to the local water company AICA, so homes and farms are being supplied with water from tankers while taps are turned off.
The hope is that upgraded water systems, new reservoirs and deep wells will help Sicily adapt as climate change makes rainfall more erratic and temperatures rise.
Giulio Boccaletti, scientific director of the European-Mediterranean Climate Change Centre, said Sicily was experiencing a “new normal” of climate change and the region needed to consider whether scarce water was being used for the right purposes, including for farmers’ produce.
