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El fundador: Ottorino Storti

Ottorino StortiInterviewing Ottorino Storti, founder of one of the most prestigious historical companies in the agricultural mechanisation sector, is not easy. Firstly it is no easy task to “flush him out” of the workshop, “the place I prefer to be at all times, says this eighty-year-old man with a vivid gaze and fluent diction.” I have never got used to being shut up in an office. I am still happiest amongst the machines at the plant. Sitting in front of a computer is not for me”. It is also difficult to squeeze into the restricted space of an interview a story that takes up well over fifty years of the history of the Belfiore company.

Storti is an optimistic man, full of initiative, who belongs to that rare breed able to learn both from good things and tragic things.
Thus, sometimes during the course of his rich account it seems that it was the most difficult events of his life that stimulated him, pushed him beyond the limit in his determined efforts to overcome obstacles.

“When you are born in a period like mine, experiencing war at first hand, either you give in or you react”, says Storti.” I opted for the second of these, thanks partly to a bit of luck: in 1944, thanks to a German lieutenant and above all to the wonderful Clinton wine produced on our farm, I spent seven months working under the Germans, far away though from the fascist threat and therefore from any fighting.

They say that you make your own luck, and Ottorino Storti has always had a very good knack. Some lose all hope in a war. Storti, on the other had, started to think, during that tragic period, how to run his father’s farm better.
He already had some ideas, obtained “from the highly valuable studies and training imparted at the Istituto Salesiano Don Bosco di Verona, where in 1943 I got a Mechanic’s Diploma”, Storti continues. “That was a real job-oriented school which taught you a specific profession, not like today” says Storti without concealing a certain disregard for today’s schools.
Anyway, Ottorino Storti left school knowing how to use the equipment to build machines.
But at the time, a lot of people could do the same. Few, however, apart from their handiness, had the tenaciousness of Ottorino Storti.

But we don’t intend to suggest that certain results are arrived at “only” by means of will power. Ottorino Storti belongs to that very small body of people for whom the adjective “genius” would be no exaggeration. You wouldn’t manage to register over thirty international patents without a large dose of genius and intuition. But Ottorino would surely not use the word genius as for him “everything comes from analysing problems, from the need for and therefore the identification of the means to overcome them”.

“When I started this business”, says Storti, “immediately after the war, Italian agriculture was almost exclusively run on arm strength. And my farm was no exception. Therefore I started to think of mechanical solutions that could speed up work in the fields”.

OK, so ideas flowed in great numbers in the mind of the young Ottorino. But where could he find the mechanical parts to carry out these projects? And here is a first excellent example of how Ottorino Storti succeeded in “exploiting” a negative thing by turning it into something useful.