Farming in a time of crisis

[CelticRambler]

Posting this under "Gardening" as it seems like the typical gubernite gardener is really a farmer trapped in the wrong body and/or century!

Anyway, this one is mainly for KHD (how's your French K? The auto-translated subtitles are ... mostly alright-ish)



Titled "Trees against drought" it describes a vineyard owner's change of strategy, to help deal with recurrent drought, specifically planting trees - lots of them - in his vineyard to reduce the need for irrigation. Intercut with that is a report on a cereal farmer doing the same thing, and some Germans raising pigs in the woods instead of boring flat fields with arks.

My neighbour would go mental at the thought of planting lines of trees in his beautifully de-hedgerowed hundred-hectare swathes of mono-culture ... but if ever I can persuade him to sell me the bit of wasteland at the back of my garden, I might try it myself (he did plant trees there, coz he was obliged to replace the ones he cut down elsewhere)

[KHD]

I'll have to come back to you on this one CR, it's such an extensive subject but very interesting. I've to spend tge day out in the orchard cutting around each of the trees which have wire guards on them and have a long day tomorrow in work so will take a look during the week when I have some time.

[CelticRambler]

No hurry - I've had it saved on my "must post this" list for about a month!

(I was also hoping I could track down a version in English - a lot of these Arte documentaries end up on DW narrated and/or dubbed/subtitled in English, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. )

[KHD]

I've watched some of that video CR, unfortunately my French language knowledge is zero, apart from being caught by my French teacher looking at her ass in school and having to awkwardly explain to my father who had to sign a three page essay I had to do on the subject of "Looking" as punishment. ( The rest of the lads used to do it too but I got caught... as usual )

I was brought up with a love of trees, even my father, in his spare time, I would see wandering around the hedges looking at all sorts of little critters and picking blackberries etc. The start of the video where your man has the combine going up the rows of Rye ? I actually had an image of that in my head a while ago while thinking of something. The vineyard towards the middle where you have a row of large trees, a couple of rows of grapes, etc makes sense I think for a fruit like this. Shaded in hot weather, maybe some protection from the frost and the big bonus of organic matter making it into the soil around them ? I always find the soil blacker under big mature trees due possibly to the organic matter provided by the leave fall in autumn and building up.

I would think tree choice is critical, you don't want something with roots that spread wide outwards just under the surface, you'd want trees that have roots that are compact and go downwards. This would be important say if you were growing corn, but again you'd probably have to have ground that is not heavy and soil that would suit min till equipment. Putting in a plough so close to any tree would damage the roots, you want the least ground disturbance possible near where the tree lines are growing. So soil type may be an issue for that type of growing method. Also trees that harbour the least pests for the type of crop you'd be growing in the rows. I was told that alder is a good tree to put around an apple orchard, but sycamore isn't obviously due it being an aphid magnet.

Irrigation is a big challenge in any veg growing operation, I have to say we never really had that problem years ago, maybe a couple of times we would be out with garden houses which stretched for hundreds of yards, the most monotonous job you could have (apart from picking rows of spinach for the Dublin Market ) but would be a rare occasion and only used really a couple of days after planting cabbage, cauliflower or calabrese plants... They were planted from large beds dipped and planted into the ground with a dipper... later we had a planting machine for the back of the tractor and the plants were in cells which was much handier and retained the moisture for longer due to been surrounded by a growing medium. Nobody really had the big rain guns they have now but the farming has gone from 2 to 5 acre market garden type fields to fields 20 to a 100 acres which is impractical to do by hand Rain guns are the biggest waste of water I've seen that are commonly used for outdoor field crops. Also the tractor can be running 24/7 for days without break at the PTO pump or special diesel pump if you can shell out 30 grand and not worry about it being stolen. It's a huge cost for vegetable farmers now if the year doesn't go right weather wise. But the problem with that is that you are only basically keeping the crop alive until such a time as the real rain arrives. In most cases the crop is not growing as the temperature is over the threshold where the crop basically shutdowns down its growing cycle.

Anyway I have noticed that if you've got good hedges and trees, the crops beside the hedge don't suffer as much as the same crop out in the middle of the field exposed to both the sun and wind ( except for the rabbits depending on the crop ) And also the soil has a higher organic content matter obviously due to the leave fall.

I think it is definitely something that we will see more of, especially in the likes of what I see in that video but we will also see more drought resistant crops and grasses. Maybe someone with a grass background can confirm this, but there is a increasing number in the livestock businesses looking at more mixed grass varieties, the introduction of more native species back into the mix that have deeper rooting systems with the usual Perenial Rye Grass that Teagasc were advising over the years ?

I've typed so much I don't know where I am now in anything

[KHD]

Just another on how farming has changed from a veg growing end of things anyway. There used to be hundreds of farmers in North County Dublin, including ourselves, with 2 / 5 / 10 acres with a bit rented if you could get it where most of the harvesting was done by hand, bar the spuds. You'd be out in all sorts of weather early in the morning or in the evening, harvesting vegetables for the market, the northgrowers, buddys in ballymun and a few wholesalers for the supermarkets. Crops were mostly grown in small fields and there was a more diverse range of vegetables grown. Most farmers would be great at doing a wide variety of crops, including salad and herb crops. Alot of experience and knowledge was gained and the seed place down in blakes cross, there was a queue on a Saturday morning for seed of all types. All of this is gone now, one of the big tragedies of North County Dublin in my opinion. Even my father to this day sometimes talks about how things were.

Anyway, one of the big ways drought problems used to be minimised to some extent was the way the crops were grown and mostly cared for by hand. During harvest time, when you were pulling say turnips out of the ground or cutting cabbage, they were always surrounding by chicken weed. It sort of kept the moisture around the roots of the crop. So, even on a dry day, the water would be running off the leaves when you cut the head of cabbage and you'd still be covered in muck when you'd be coming in from the fields. Now the problem is that the crop needs to be very clean... so if you look at a field of turnips or cabbage now, there is almost no weeds as the harvest period was coming up. This is because both the self propelled harvesters and trailed harvesters simply don't like too much weed so the crop must be squeaky clean and also prepared and topped before hand if necessary. So the soil from time the crop is in the ground to harvest is bare, so is also more susceptible to evaporation of moisture.

This has also had a bad impact on wildlife... when a harvester goes into a field it takes the complete layer of clay along with the vegetables... so what comes out is basically a field of bare muck with nothing there for anything to feed on. This is another consequence of the current large scale practices but we are all to blame for this as instead of going to a vegetable shop that might get produce locally from a local small grower we just hit the supermarket who has one supplier all year round.. but that is the way things go and am guilty for it myself. All the vegetable shops, including my dad's have closed long ago as they could not compete at the time. Although if he had it now it might be different as there seems to be a resurgence in this type of local produce but most of the growers are gone and land is too expensive and getting less and less around Dublin.

Edit just thinking about pre emergence / post emergence herbicides... most crops now are spayed with both... so say on a crop of onions you can spray the onions with a herbicide, it will kill all the weeds bar the onion crop. We never used these as they were either unavailable or in the early stages of development and we never trusted them. The alleys were sprayed between the drills with a knapsack sprayer with Gramoxone 100 which you'd have to do on a calm day as it would burn everything in it's path... including the crop if you were not paying attention.. but it wasn't a systemic herbicide... it was a contact herbicide which just burned whatever it hit. This would be done once before the crop gets over the drill... after that the weeds grew away and the grey patridges were happy... which are no longer around...

[KHD]

So my point in the last post after all of my meanderings is that weeds are also good for keeping the moisture in if managed in between certain crops if you don't let them take over and you are harvesting them by hand. But it is important to make sure the crop is clean at the early stages of growth when it is getting established, if that makes sense.

[CelticRambler]

Anyway I have noticed that if you've got good hedges and trees, the crops beside the hedge don't suffer as much as the same crop out in the middle of the field exposed to both the sun and wind ( except for the rabbits depending on the crop )

I've seen the same thing on my own bit of land, which came as a bit of a shock after living the first part of my life with a square of garden sub-let from my mother that was under a Lawson cypress hedge and the next with a scrap of garden under the neighbours' 20m high beech "hedge" (they let it get out of control ... ) Under those, nothing grew without a lot of intensive care, so between that and being tuned into the wrong kind of industrial farming propaganda, I thought all trees would kill anything but their own kind.

Not at all. These days, the best quality grass (i.e. that which clogs up the mower because it grows so much faster than the "lawn") is that with the most shade - growing right under some 100-year-old oaks in one part, and on the north side of an oak-hawthorn-acacia hedge in another. Even in this year's drought, short enough as it was, that grass would sometimes still be properly wet in the mornings, while the rest was burnt brown.

Around here, at least, oaks have a reputation for being non-competitive when it comes to water, as they'll be sucking it from 15-20m down and aren't bothered about weedy things like cabbages and carrots and potatoes sipping from the few dozen centimetres on the surface! As for running the plough too close to them ... well, there's quite a move here away from ploughing altogether, and not just by eco-warrior small-holders. I'm not sure exactly what was sown in the previously-an-oat-field in front of my house back in autumn, but even these contractors didn't use a plough when they were working it at the beginning of October.

Anyway, one of the big ways drought problems used to be minimised to some extent was the way the crops were grown and mostly cared for by hand. During harvest time, when you were pulling say turnips out of the ground or cutting cabbage, they were always surrounding by chicken weed. It sort of kept the moisture around the roots of the crop. So, even on a dry day, the water would be running off the leaves when you cut the head of cabbage and you'd still be covered in muck when you'd be coming in from the fields.

With this year's planting scheme, I was really impressed by how well certain plants could keep the soil underneath not just damp but wet even during the hottest weeks, so I'll be trying "the same but better" next year.

I do think we have an advantage here in France in that there's still a huge emotional attachment to small-scale farming, where "growing your own veg" isn't any kind of a lifestyle statement. It's just normal life for people with a decent sized garden, always has been, and if you don't have the time or space, you'll almost certainly have others in your social circle who produce tonnes of usable veg (and eggs, cheese, fruit, juice, cider, poitín, maybe even meat and poultry) that feeds the volunteers at local events.

That makes it easy for almost anyone to step things up a bit and become a sustainable local producer, with the (relatively) easy of experimenting and/or switching to hybrid production methods like "trees and grains" or whatever. I get the impression that Ireland has gone too far down the industrial-scale farming to turn back, which is a pity, and it's not helped by ridiculous prices for farmable land.

[KHD]

I don't think ireland has many industrial scale farms compared to the UK or Holland. Its mostly small scale family businesses, such as the dairy and livestock end of thing, maybe some pig and poultry operations you could class as industrial or in the case of horticulture, which is where I'm coming from, is now down to a small group of growers that weathered the storm some years ago and had enough land to get bigger and keep their heads about water and in most cases still just keeping their heads above water no matter how big they have gotten!

There are some farmers markets and shops. Some are good others just buy the same produce from the same lads that supply the supermarkets, via wholesalers, and add a few pence onto it so that the people with money think they are getting some specially grown product but is the same thing the rest of us buy in aldi or lidl.

I remember my grandfather and father, if there was was a certain type of wealthy looking customer, the 4 stone bags of potatoes never had a price on them, so normally say they would be 4 pounds, if someone pulled up in a merc they would add an extra pound on the bag of potatoes

[CelticRambler]

Ah sure we get that carry-on with the markets here. Tourists going mental over them, raving about the "so amazing fresh fruit and veg" when anyone with a keen eye knows they bought it from the local wholesaler last Monday morning and they've been hawking it around every village market since then!

But the "family farms" you refer to would be considered "industrial" by many French rural folk, in that they'd be supplying a single commercial buyer, not doing their own butchering/packing/preserving and sales. For some produce - like pasteurised milk - there's little choice but to sell to a coop or supermarket buyer, but there'd be a huge number of small/family producers here who handle the whole business from planting the seed (or running a ram with the ewes) to selling the final consumable product either on a plate in their own restaurant or in a bag/box.

In another thread some time ago, I mentioned how these farmers made hay (made a killing? any other farming metaphor? ) during the pandemic, because they were not tied into the "industrial" supply chains and were able quickly increase their direct sales without having to change their model too much. I haven't heard whether or not things have slowed down for them since, but judging by the number of gaps in the shelves "due to supply chain problems" I'd say there's still a big market for this brand of high quality take-what-you're-given service.

[CelticRambler]

The downside to this rural idyll - which also plagues thousands of small non-farming French businesses - is that they are exclusively family enterprises, and frequently run on the back of magic money. When it comes to passing them on, if there's no willing idiot in the family who'll continue to put in the hours for peanuts, there's often no way to sell the business as a going concern. If it's something like a bakery, a butchers or a restaurant, the local council might buy the building, re-fit it to modern standards and then spend a few years trying to get someone to run it, just to keep a bit of life in the village, but I'd see places like this advertising for new managers every couple of years (the same place, over and over again) because they're just not viable. At least not when run by the French!

[KHD]

The downside to this rural idyll - which also plagues thousands of small non-farming French businesses - is that they are exclusively family enterprises, and frequently run on the back of magic money. When it comes to passing them on, if there's no willing idiot in the family who'll continue to put in the hours for peanuts, there's often no way to sell the business as a going concern. If it's something like a bakery, a butchers or a restaurant, the local council might buy the building, re-fit it to modern standards and then spend a few years trying to get someone to run it, just to keep a bit of life in the village, but I'd see places like this advertising for new managers every couple of years (the same place, over and over again) because they're just not viable. At least not when run by the French!

When is your first crop of saffron that's what I really want to know.

[CelticRambler]

That was last year! The second one's picked and dried and in the jar a month already.

I'm on to the lambs lettuce now (growing in the saffron bed) ... or at least thinking sadly about it, coz we're 600km apart at the moment.

As long as the deer haven't scoffed the lot during my absence, though, it should be in great shape when I get back and I'll be picking it till February or March.

Oh, and one by one, the few tomatoes I brought with me are gradually turning red. I'm keeping an eye on the weather and I think the ones at home, still on the vine, haven't yet been hit with a frost, so I might yet get a kilo or two off that brave little plant!

[KHD]

That was last year! The second one's picked and dried and in the jar a month already.

I'm on to the lambs lettuce now (growing in the saffron bed) ... or at least thinking sadly about it, coz we're 600km apart at the moment.

As long as the deer haven't scoffed the lot during my absence, though, it should be in great shape when I get back and I'll be picking it till February or March.

Oh, and one by one, the few tomatoes I brought with me are gradually turning red. I'm keeping an eye on the weather and I think the ones at home, still on the vine, haven't yet been hit with a frost, so I might yet get a kilo or two off that brave little plant!

I've just had a thought flash through my head there reading about the tomatoes that I would mindn't having a go at growing them via hydroponics. Watch this space man.

Interesting,

https://rurallivingtoday.com/hydroponic ... -tomatoes/