Paolo and Umberto Mainardi

Among all Ecorì's members, Umberto Mainardi is the only "foreigner", originally from the province of Cremona, and one of the first to believe in the birth of Ecorì: a team of farmers united by the desire to create excellent rice farming. Umberto inherits rice farming techniques from his Lombard family and transfers them to Piedmont to Cascina Barciocchina, where he settled with his father Marcellino in the 1960s. Granozzo con Monticello is a village of few souls, immersed in the Novara countryside, whose name is evocative: in an almost totally flat territory, a hill a few meters high rises, almost entirely covered with rice.

Technology and innovation are the cornerstones of the Mainardi family, for avant-garde rice farming that combines good field production with respect for the environment. Always up with the times, Umberto had already started cultivating Carnaroli in 1968, a cultivar born in the province of Milan in 1945, but remained almost unknown until the 1990s. A farsighted choice that led the farm to specialize in the cultivation of what is today the most prized variety for risottos.

In the 90s, the Mainardi family began to run the Brignona farmhouse, immersed in a truly unique ecosystem, where the bucolic landscape hosts the typical fauna of the rice fields. Here his son Paolo, who graduated in Engineering from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1998, joined the company, and like his father, he was in love with rice farming and its lands. Today the family's agricultural tradition is more alive than ever, with the production of the historic Carnaroli, but also Vialone Nano and Arborio, only excellent rice for connoisseur risottos.