A pig lives nine months before it becomes Parma ham.
It must weigh at least 160 kilograms on the slaughterhouse and it must only have eaten a selected diet: corn, barley, soy and wheat bran, plus some vitamins and minerals.
"My pigs usually weigh 180 kilos," says Andrea Marchesini, not without pride.
The 35-year-old Italian currently has more than 8,000 pigs in his stables, and 18,000 fattening animals go through his farm every year.
In the bays, the four-legged friends crowd between gray concrete walls.
They each have an outdoor and indoor area that is freely accessible through a door.
The feed comes computer-controlled via iron pipes into the troughs.
Christian Schubert
Economic correspondent for Italy and Greece.
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Marchesini is one of the larger farmers in the area between Brescia and Lake Garda.
Over the course of time, he bought up surrounding businesses that had given up due to a lack of successors.
But for weeks he has been facing a major challenge: How is he supposed to feed his pigs when it stops raining?
Marchesini has just hopped down a dirt road in his dusty Renault van and explained the situation.
To the right of the path is a field of dried corn at different heights, no more than 1.80 meters high.
The yellowish plants bear only small cobs with shriveled grains.
"Normally, the corn would have to be four meters high here," says Marchesini.
To the left of the path, the corn looks juicier and taller.
The farmer has made strict selections and only supplied a small field with enough water so that the feed for the pigs grows properly there at least.
He will soon harvest the dried corn on the opposite side and sell it as fodder for cattle.
"But because of the poor quality, I hardly get anything for it."
The farmer currently checks the climate several times a day on his mobile phone.
He has set up his own weather station on his farm, with which he supplies data to a meteorological organization.
It records parameters such as temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind.
The daily look at the numbers is a single disappointment, and has been for weeks.
The drought is so intense in northern Italy that even older generations cannot find parallels in the past.
"Even our 96-year-old grandmother can't remember anything like that," says Marchesini.
It hasn't rained in the area for 160 days.
A high pressure area from Africa brings new heat again.
The probability of rain, which Marchesini reads on his mobile phone, does not exceed 4 percent for the next few days.
The Coldiretti Agricultural Association calls 2022 the warmest year on record with extremely little rainfall.
His records go back to the 1800s.
The warmest five years over the past two centuries have all occurred since 2015.
According to a study by the Wheat Initiative, a group of public and private grain research organizations, wheat yields worldwide drop by seven percent for every degree Celsius of global warming.
According to the agricultural association, the lack of water threatens half of northern Italy's agricultural production.
The damage for the farmers amounts to at least three billion euros.
Wheat and corn yields could fall by at least a third this year.
Even the farming of fish and seafood is at risk, the farms report, as higher water temperatures and less rain increase salinity.