Hydrogeographic deterioration is combated through systematic operations for land maintenance as well as with suitable mechanical means. Without mechanized shovels, backhoe loaders, track and semi-track forestry tractors, ditch diggers, machinery for caring for banks and water channels, shredding systems for vegetable residues and equipment for the removal of dangerous materials it is not possible to carry out effective operations and apply preventive measures.
A review of these mechanical engineering technologies will be on display at EIMA International – the world agricultural mechanization exposition set for 12 to 16 November in Bologna – in the M.i.A. Salon on multifunctional agriculture, a specialized sector in the Bologna event revolving around parallel agriculture activities conducted in a rural environment and including all operations in natural surroundings and civil protection.
Visitors arriving in the trade fair center Four-Sided Arch area will find on display all the principal types of machinery for work to counter hydrogeographic deterioration along with technical specification sheets; furthermore among the conferences scheduled for in depth examinations is one on the issue Hydrogeographic Risk: A Mechanization Issue promoted by FederUnacoma, Promoverde and Landmaking which will also provide estimates of mechanization requirements for maintenance operations and indications on the types of machinery to use in relation to needs.
Italy's Institute for Environmental Protection and Research has, in fact, evaluated nearly 5,600 municipalities in Italy, nearly 70% of the total, located in areas of high hydrogeographic risk and described the scenario and variables of management – from those related to the morphology of terrain to those involving the types of risk, collapse, slides, pyroclasitic flow, debris and mudflow. Each type of phenomenon requires the intervention of a specific type of mechanical technology for the phase of prevention and in rescue operations.
FederUnacoma President Massimo Goldoni has asserted, “The plunge in the sale of agricultural and earthmoving machinery over the past seven years resulting from the financial and economic crisis has produced a shortfall of eleven million tractors and more than twenty thousand units of earthmoving machinery which, in normal conditions, would have been purchased and put to work in all the country's regions and, in part, would have been earmarked precisely for the activities of land maintenance.”
He went on to say, “Presenting a section dedicated to deterioration in the framework of an agricultural mechanization exposition is a message which is also political because we are recalling the way agriculture and taking care of the land are not separate sectors but activities to conceive and support as an integrated and organic whole.”
