The Cascina Santa Marta team in front of the farm shop, behind a bed of roses

Cascina Santa Marta: from field to bag in a day or two

At a glance

  • Grown without herbicides, insecticides, fungicides or synthetic fertilisers.
  • 40+ vegetable varieties a season on just 4.5 hectares, about 200,000 plants.
  • Picked by hand, every day. Most of the field work is done by hand too.
  • Grown in the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano, the protected farmland just south-west of the city.
  • A courtyard farm on record since 1722, carefully restored in the 2000s.
  • Praised by ilGolosario and MilanoToday in 2024 for its vegetables and its butcher’s counter.

Forty vegetables on six football pitches

Cascina Santa Marta grows more than 40 varieties of vegetable a season on 4.5 hectares, roughly six football pitches. That comes to about 200,000 plants and, by the farm’s own count, around 1,500 kilos of vegetables a week.

Most farms pick one crop and plant it to the horizon. This one does the opposite, on purpose: a small plot, many crops, everything worked up close. The partners call it neither intensive nor extensive farming.

This week their online shop lists cuore di bue and datterini tomatoes, Delica squash, savoy cabbage, romanesco, fennel, leeks, chard, borlotti beans and Tropea onions.

Picked by hand, every day

At Santa Marta most of the work is done by hand, and the harvest always is. The farm’s own counter puts it at 10,000 steps a day, up and down the rows.

They pick every day, and the vegetables go on sale one or two days later. One or two days, field to bag.

Marco put it in two sentences when we asked what sets his vegetables apart: “We grow vegetables naturally and harvest every day. These two things make our produce very fresh and healthy.”

No pesticides, no synthetic fertilisers

No herbicides. No insecticides. No fungicides. No synthetic fertilisers. That is the farm’s own rule, and its stated aim is vegetables carrying none of their residues.

The soil gets the same attention as the crop. The partners farm to keep it fertile year after year, and to leave room for the plants and animals that were in those fields before anyone planted a leek.

They add one more line, about people: good food shouldn’t come from wearing out the land, or the people who work it.

Why no two look alike

We asked Marco if there was anything else we should know. He didn’t talk about taste. “Our produce isn’t all identical like at the supermarket. Shape and weight can vary, and sometimes there’s a flaw, because it’s natural.”

So one courgette will be fatter than the next. A carrot may fork. There may be a mark on a cabbage leaf where something else got there first.

Who grows it

Four partners run the farm. Marco Traversi works the fields and looks after the wholesale customers. Marco Laurenti splits his days between the books and the fields, Giacomo Drufuca is the president, and master butcher Angelo Canella runs the shop.

Marco Traversi didn’t inherit the place. He had worked there for years for the company that ran the land and the shop, and when it decided to close, it asked him to take over. In February 2022 he set up a new company with Laurenti and Drufuca. Canella joined a year later.

Off the field, Marco cycles and does triathlon, as if 10,000 steps a day weren’t enough. His favourite part of the job is the harvest: “when you hold the results of the hard work in your hands.”

A farm on the map since 1722

Cascina Santa Marta is one of the oldest courtyard farms in the Bassa, the flat farmland south of Milan. The 1722 Theresian land register lists it as property of the Monastery of Santa Marta in Milan, which is probably where the name comes from.

Between 1855 and 1866 the old buildings made way for the closed square courtyard that stands today, entered under a crenellated tower. A careful restoration in the 2000s brought nearly all of it back.

Around it: rice fields, vegetable rows, fruit trees, horses and goats. The farm sits at Zibido San Giacomo, inside the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano, close enough to reach by bike along the Naviglio Pavese.

The shop and the butcher’s counter

At the farm, the vegetables sit next to a full butcher’s counter. Angelo Canella brought it with him when he joined in 2023: carcasses arrive in halves and are cut in the farm’s own workrooms.

The counter is laid out like a pastry case. Meat cannoli, meat “donuts”, and the house invention, the Bollechino, a cross between bollito and cotechino. They’re made in small batches through the day, and the regulars order ahead.

The shelves carry cheese, cured meat, oil, wine and jam, mostly from small producers, plus beer from the Cascinazza monastery, two kilometres down the road. MilanoToday and ilGolosario both wrote the place up in 2024.

Order on Nuar, pick up at Le Polveri

Cascina Santa Marta’s vegetables and meat are now on the Nuar app. Order there, then pick up your order at Le Polveri, Via Vespri, on Thursday 22 October, 17:30–18:30.

📸 @cascinasantamarta

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