Les paysages viticoles – de l’avant à l’après pétrole
(sous-titres en français et anglais)
par Régis Ambroise (Ingénieur Agronome et Urbaniste)
Depuis la deuxième moitié du 20ème siècle, l’avènement du pétrole a profondément remodelé la structure paysagère, l’aménagement du territoire et la façon dont l’agriculture s’empare de ses terres.
Si jusqu’à la fin du 19ème siècle la beauté paysagère – et tout ce que cela implique – était synonyme d’épanouissement des populations et de réussite d’un projet politique, le 20ème siècle a vu naître la déstructuration et le remembrement au profit d’une agriculture industrialisée.
Régis Ambroise nous éclaire à travers l’histoire sur l’importance d’une beauté paysagère qui, loin d’être naïve, est synonyme de civilisations durables – qu’elles soient viticoles ou non.
Vignoble & Biodiversité #2 – La viticulture de demain commence aujourd’hui
18 & 19 janvier 2024 – Avignon (Palais des Papes)
Ce cycle de conférences, trait d’union entre la science et le terrain, offre un véritable tour d’horizon des enjeux autour de la biodiversité, tout en dépassant largement aussi bien les limites cadastrales que le cadre stricte de la viticulture en générale.
Conçu comme un dialogue ouvert, pluridisciplinaire et transversal qui s’adresse au monde viticole, le but est le partage des connaissances, la mise en valeur et la mise en commun de l’expérience pratique et scientifique, le décloisonnement des échanges et la création d’une dynamique vertueuse dans laquelle la biodiversité devient un but collectif et non pas une mission individuelle.
©VignobleBiodiversité
©VineyardsBiodiversity
#developpementdurable #viticulture #biodiversité #architecturepaysagere #transmission #openscience
We decided to go organic a long time ago, when our parents created the vineyard. However, the biodiversity aspect, for example by sowing between the rows, is a decision that we made with my brother Enzo seven years ago. There were a lot of constraints and doubts – a lot of doubts – precisely related to the yield problems we experienced. Today, we’re convinced that we are right. We aim for the future. My brother and I want to say to each other that once we’re up there, we’ll have the pleasure of looking at the vines that we planted today and they’ll still be there in 80 years’ time. We won’t. So it was obvious for us to follow Birte. Well, hello everyone and thank you to Birte and all the organizers for inviting me to this conference. You asked me to talk about landscape issues. So I’ve chosen to start with this image, which is a detail of a large fresco, the ‘fresco of good government’, which is in the public palace in Siena. Sébastien Giorgis and I discovered it at the time, 40 years ago, when we were working more or less together. He was part of an association, I was at the Ministry of the Environment and we had launched a working group on terrace landscapes. On that occasion, we came across the ‘fresco of good government’, which later ended a book we had done called “Landscape of Terraces”. This detail of the fresco, I chose it because there are vineyards and you can see some beautiful farmhouses. Well, there’s a castle above them, though. In the vineyard, there are trees and animals below. Mixed farming, which is interesting, especially when you know that this fresco was painted in 1350, at the same time as the Great Plague, at a time when there were fewer people in the countryside than ever before. So the fresco as a whole. In one corner you have the detail I showed you. In this fresco, you have half city, half countryside. Opposite this large fresco, you have another, which is the fresco of bad government. It’s less well preserved. But it’s recognisable: there have been fires, erosion, wars. And here you have a kind of landscape, a project, something to get people excited about. And not just any people, but those in charge. These leaders are on a third fresco – so you have the good, the bad – where the notables are talking amongst themselves. They have to decide where to go. So here you have a kind of comic strip with a project that is also political – in other words, the feudal lords who were responsible for the failure of society had to be challenged. We see the merchants arriving with the bankers; they want to take power. But at the same time, they couldn’t do it alone. They must do it with the craftsmen we see in the city, and with the farmers. The farmers were serfs. They were offered the chance to become sharecroppers, meaning that they have greater freedom and can be committed to working harder to produce wealth. We have this political project which is a step forward, a technical project to build cities using the best techniques. At the far end, over there, you have the first dome represented. This agriculture – the agricultura promiscua italiana – is well known, with the relationship between livestock, agriculture and trees. At the same time, we have a kind of cultural project where, in artistic terms if you like, the landscape becomes part of the social project. It’s interesting because in 1350, as we know, perspective didn’t yet exist. And this fresco, which is a draft, already is really ahead of all the problems, ahead of its time. You can see how the landscape depicted was bound to enthral the populations from top to bottom. If we continue with this type of historical reasoning, we come right up to the French Revolution. The Revue Européenne d’Agronomie, one of a number of journals that was published, set out the main principles of what needed to be done to ensure that the countryside develops much better than it had before the Revolution when, once again, the lords weren’t too concerned about developing the country. There were famines and it’s no coincidence that the revolution happened. People were not well off. At some point, you have a drawing on the left, and a few pages later a drawing on the right. The left one shows the state of France at the time, with the desert mountains. There’s not much there and the revolutionaries are getting to work. They plant trees along the river, the trees of Liberty. They put fish back into the rivers. And we have the project. It is written: “fructification of arid mountains and wastelands, and repopulation of the waters of France”. So that was the project. Landscape is all about the project. It’s not just about protecting the past. At the time, it was conceived as a project for society. And on the right, you have this project as it might look 50, 100 years down the line, which is quite interesting. You can see the well-kept houses for the farmers, they are not hovels. Livestock and crops, and the miraculous fishing poles. Here again, you have a development project that is also a political project. At the time of the French Revolution, the message was: "Land to the farmers". Give the land to the farmers. So it didn’t happen straight away, or very well, or just like that. But still, this was the axis. In technical terms, it was the valorisation of previously uncultivated land. That’s what it says. Basically, it was to introduce mixed farming and livestock allowing to increase the productivity of all the countryside as a whole. In cultural terms, in all the texts – political, technical, artistic – that we find at the time, it was important to combine the useful with the pleasurable. It’s part of the messages: between what’s beautiful and what’s pleasurable, there’s a relationship to be found. There can be no good agriculture if it isn’t beautiful. This even comes from Olivier de Serres, who already stated this much earlier. So we were in this culture of making a connection between the beautiful and the good, that the two combine to develop together. At the same time, this isn’t contrary to the idea of the ‘Pays de Cocagne’ where, obviously, you don’t make a revolution just for fun. It’s about living better, producing more and sharing it more equally. So there is social harmony as well as greater productivity. What’s interesting on the right is that the whole of the 19th century was a great rural century, one could say. It wasn’t magnificent either, we shouldn’t idealise too much. But the fact remains that all the small French agricultural regions were created. They developed at that time as the AOCs. This is the best part of our heritage from that great era. We know that in the Franche-Comté region, Comté cheese was made. Elsewhere, it was vineyards, and so on. At the time, Napoleon was travelling around, being represented, and he would meet with local councillors or agricultural advisers who would say to him: ‘Regenerated France is asking you to recreate this beautiful nature over its entire surface’. You can see how at the time there wasn’t the split we have today between nature and culture. The two are interlinked and this connection is being made and asked for. The political leaders of the time were asked to encourage this link in order to produce for the population, whether rural or urban. In the end, you have to recreate this beautiful nature, you have to work to create it. It’s not a given. Nature is there, but if you want to use it for production, you have to put it in, you have to shape it, you have to create the space to make it happen. So, throughout the 19th century, what were farmers able to do, how did they finally get there? At the end of the 19th century, France was considered to be the garden of Europe. Tourism developed on that basis. All the small regions had developed their own identity, their own production, which often gave the name to the region. And that’s how it happened. How did they do it? The natural components of the agricultural landscape, what the farmers were able to work with, was the soil on which they were going to grow either crops or livestock. When it comes to vineyards, you know that a particular type of soil is more suited to a particular type of vineyard. It was very precise. The plots were often linked to the type of soil underneath. We were very careful about it. The animals had to be selected. Breeds were selected from all the regions that were best adapted to climate, the soil, the diversity, and so on. And then the trees. Forest trees. They were not systematically eliminated. Some were kept. And in the production systems, the tree, the field tree you might say, was a fully-fledged component of the production system. Depending on the region, they could be found in high and low hedges, copses, etc. There were also isolated trees, there were trees everywhere. And in agronomy textbooks, there were whole chapters dealing with trees in agricultural terms, in production systems for heating, and so on. Water is obviously essential for crops, but sometimes there’s too much water, sometimes there’s not enough. So a whole irrigation and drainage system was put in place, which could be extremely sophisticated, extremely economical and which enabled production. Because let’s not forget that in the 19th century, the vast majority of the population was rural. They were fed, people lived hard, that’s clear, because everything was done by hand. But they lived, they managed to eat. Nevertheless, they still produced a lot. Here, you can see how the water was taken from a small stream on the left. There’s a canal and at the end of the canal, when they wanted to irrigate by submersion, they put a barrier. In terms of energy, it was manual energy, okay, but there was no other. The stone, of course, interferes with cultivation, but we learned to use it either to hold the soil, which otherwise would have eroded away, or to make paths in all terraced systems, of course. And the wind. We were also able to use the wind. Like a wind turbine, to fetch the water below. But there were also natural systems, with trees as windbreaks and so on. All these natural resources that were there became assets from the moment they were organised in space. All this had to be staged and composed. And that’s what farmers did, and they succeeded. They looked around and found systems that were more suitable. They could do it in such and such climate, there was such and such wind, and so on. What we now call landscape structures were put in place. There are a few major landscape structures. There aren’t so many in France. You have the main families of structures that have been adopted from one region to another because they worked quite well. And then they were adapted because there was a bit more wind here than elsewhere. You have the whole bocage family, for example. In some areas, they are bocages with high hedges. In other areas, there are low hedges, as in Saône et Loire. You have the stone hedges, lithic ones in the Manche region. You have areas of large-scale farming, such as in the Paris basin or in these type of regions. Or you have a few copses. And then the three-field system that’s being pur in place. In the steppe – and we have this in the causses, the Larzac causses for exemple – you have pebbles at the top, then in all the dolines below you make hay for the winter. The marshes. In the west of France, there are a huge number of marshes, which is why you need to be able to make the right adjustments to water levels. Working with water levels so that there’s always grass available. In the mountains, the problem is not to cultivate the areas, but to be able to mow the grass to make hay for the six months of winter. Then put summer grass out to pastures in the more difficult areas, such as woodland meadows or things like that, as in the Jura for example. In the valleys, there will be flooding. There is a canal all along here so that after flooding water can leave quickly. Then there are all the terrace systems that that Sébastien Giorgis and I studied together a few years ago. This involved research and invention. There was agricultural development, as we would say today. One day – after the Ministry of Environment I was working at the Ministry of Agriculture on landscape issues – a colleague phoned and said: “Listen, I’ve found some books that might interest you.” She was working in the archives and she gave me 7 books, which were books written about honour awards. In each of the books, there were about ten departments. They were written in 1860, under Napoleon III, and the Ministry’s general engineers visited the French departments. They had to describe the originality of these regions, explaining the biodiversity, the agronomic systems, whether there were forests or not. It was a very precise and interesting description. After that, prizes were awarded to the best farmers in the department. There were several awards, even for agricultural schools. I took the one for the Aude department, which was for a wine estate. So I’m taking advantage of that. As you can see, there’s a very accurate diagnosis of these farms: what they produce, the inputs they use and which were not chemical, how they work, what they produce, all the materials. Were they good employers? Because it wasn’t the small farms that were promoted. For all the first prizes there was a plan like this one, very precise, well done, a book, a surveyor’s plan with – you can see it in the legend – the land, meadows, Spanish broom, vineyards, olive trees, scrubland, woods, with the drainage and irrigation system, the riparian forest, the house with the garden around it, etc. A surveyor’s study, but well done. You have the building there. Often, buildings were converted into cooperative cellars later on. Again, very precise. So for the first prizes, there were often bird’s-eye drawings done to encourage farmers to go down this route. It’s very interesting, because you can see the agricultural models that were used at the time. There are some in Brittany, orchard meadows. Nowadays we think it’s a bit old-fashioned, but at the time, it was a discovery, a novelty, because they were able to produce grass and trees on the same surface, they could make cheese and at the same time booze. In the wine-growing system. Once, I was in town and presented this picture at a meeting. There was a specialist in the representation of the vine in history. She told us that vineyards had contributed to the landscape, especially from the end of the 19th century onwards. She showed us this because before the end of the 19th century, vineyards were planted ‘en foule’, you know, here and there. There weren’t these alignments that we see here, which were a discovery that happened when there were wires that made it possible to align the rows. The vineyards then became a much more constitutive element of the landscape. They appeared in the development of landscapes at that time. The illustrator obviously emphesises the technical aspect of using these wires to align the vines. But at the same time, what is it oriented towards? You see that the direction is towards the estate, the chateau, I don’t know what you call it over here. And this is obviously to encourage the whole bourgeoisie of Montpellier and the surroundings to invest their money in the countryside, to develop agriculture. So these drawings, these landscapes, obviously have a symbolism which at the time was to develop both the best techniques and to show the quality of something interesting, to go and invest in the countryside. What’s also interesting – and this is more of a wink to the world of landscape architects – is that there are obviously debates, and in these debates there are landscape architects or landscape thinkers who say: there is no such thing as landscape unless one day an artist decides that it’s beautiful, and says that it’s beautiful, so that everyone accepts that it’s beautiful. That always used to irritate me a bit. As it happens, I used to work with farmers. You have this picture that was taken in the Douro valley. It was an artist who depicted the Douro in Portugal. Every station has a little railway that runs along the valley. In every station, you have a ceramic like this one. That’s when I started working in the Jura as an agricultural advisor. I think it’s a beautiful image. It’s the highest commune in the Haut-Jura. You’ve got permanent meadows and a bit of pre-forest above it. In 1975-1980, there were still cereal crops. Farmers from the Lower Jura used to go up there to collect seeds, as they grew very well down there. But why am I showing you this? Because the name of this commune, what is it called? It’s written here. It’s Bellecombe (Beautiful Valley). And not far away, there is Pré Coquet (Pretty Meadow). There are lots of names with messages of beauty. These names, Pré Coquet, there are others, it wasn’t artists who gave the name of the village, it was the inhabitants themselves. The farmers were proud of what they did. They knew that in such and such a place, they had succeded. That what they had done was magnificent. In other places, it was Les Mouilles (The Wetlands), Les Rasses (The Staves). That doesn’t mean they weren’t useful, but they weren’t great. All that to say that there was a culture of farming, of landscaping, of landscape gardening one could say, that existed at the same time as an agronomic genius that made it possible to adapt to all French regions. Here, I am talking about the French Upper Jura, but on the other side, there is the Gruyère Valley. And that valley is said to be the valley of ‘farmer painters’. They have chalets just like here. Above the chalet doors, there are frescoes. These frescoes were drawn and painted by the farmers. They did it themselves. They still do. So this culture exists, because they were very proud – with an agricultural motif like going up to the mountain pastures with the herd, etc. They were proud of the fact that they were able to work in extremely difficult regions with an impossible climate, and to produce a rich, high-quality product. This is also what we have in the vineyard. I worked for a while with the CERVIM, which some of you may know: the centre for study and research on mountain vines. They work on what they call the heroic viticulture. This is the terraced vineyard. Here again, we find the pride of having been able to produce wines of very high quality in areas that are very difficult, and which have a role to play in regional planning. Because there are areas where these vines have been abandoned. I have in mind an example from the Val d’Aosta, which you’ll see later. We held a conference and were on a road. And there, there was an area where the vines were no longer grown. There had been major flooding and the road had collapsed. The fact that the vines were no longer maintained meant that the area itself was completely deteriorated. It was up to the local authorities to spend a lot of money to do what the farmers had been doing for free until then. It was a way of recognising the work that farmers had done to manage the area properly. It’s black and white, not color. I’m sorry, it’s a bit big. That’s what could be found in the agricultural chambers after WWII. We can clearly see the change that has taken place in the 20th century around agricultural production systems, which were no longer production systems based on natural resources, biodiversity, soils, trees, animals. What is going to enable production, is oil. Oil, Petrofina, which is a petroleum company, is involved in nitrogen fertilisers, oil or fossil resources, direct petroleum products, fuel for tractors, phytosanitary products. It’s all chemistry. Maintenance, washing, refregeration, etc. And a new European organisation for the production and distribution of agricultural products. You can see how oil is going to change everything: there’s no more horsepower, it’s the tractor. For refregeration, we no longer go out and get ice like we used to. It’s all oil. And that means reorganising the land to make the best use of this magical new resource: oil. To do this, we have land consolidation, drainage and irrigation. The land is no longer reorganised by learning all its specificities and singularities, but reorganised to make it useful for oil-based agriculture. There have been more than 20,000 land consolidations, out of the 30,000, 35,000 communes in France. At the Ministry of Agriculture, if you wanted a career, if you hadn’t been at the land consolidation office, it was much harder. That’s what you had to do. DDT. Shell. It’s the same thing again. Perhaps we’ll come back to the vine, because I’d like to come back to the vine. You can’t say that vineyards were excluded from all these phytosanitary treatments. They were used because the products were available. They were used except where it wasn’t possible, especially on slopes where the soil was very fragile. There, if too much chemical fertiliser was used, the soil would erode. Often these plots were better managed than elsewhere, even if there were economic problems behind it. This is the biodiversity model in contemporary farming systems. John Deere, the big machines. This model was taken from one of their brochures from the 1990s. You can see this immensity, there’s a kind of landscape quality of emptiness, of American-style immensity. Some people may be enthousiastic about the idea of controlling the land and nature. They dominate all that and produce. In 1990, things were still going well. Except that we started to realise that these systems were beginning to pollute the water. That was the time when, after major rainstorms, all the fish were dying. The Minister for the Environment at the time attacked the farmers, saying: "You’re using too many pesticides, that’s not okay." Then the biodiversity problems began to emerge. We can see that there is only one species here: the one we produce. Everything else on these hundreds of hectares is gone. It’s clear that we are beginning to unterstand that biodiversity is an essential part of the great equilibrium if we are to survive. It’s not just a matter of looking pretty. It’s that if we no longer have enough biodiversity, we won’t have the great balances that allow us to have breathable air and to have everything we need. John Deere understands that when it comes to pollution, you need to be a little more subtle. Using Photoshop, they put a nice row of trees in the background and that’s it. But it’s clear that nothing has changed. The agricultural production system is the same. Simply, we’re going to create nature protection zones a little further away, Natura 2000 zones, stuff like that. But nothing is changing about the agricultural production system. The problem is that from the years 2000-2010 onwards, something new is coming down the pike. It is not simply biodiversity and pollution. We used to say that we’d do integrated farming, that we’d put fertilisers just where they were needed, when they were needed, just enough to prevent them from getting into the water. Our engineers are great, everything’s going to go smoothly. But now we realise that there’s the issue of global warming. That global warming is linked to oil, and that it’s an essential issue. In other words, it is absolutely necessary to regulate, adapt already, and then stop continuing to degrade the climate through the use of oil. It’s a fact that oil is at the heart of the agricultural engine. I’m talking about agriculture here, but I sometimes do the same thing in the city. Here, it’s the car that has transformed everything, the urban landscapes and so on. So this model has to be questioned, because of oil. Between biodiversity and oil, we are heading straight for the wall. There is no way out, we have to change the system. The main challenges: in the models that have been developed, we have these large areas to produce with large plots of land. We have larger farms. That’s fine. But the problem is the increase in plot size. When you have plots of 40 hectares, even if you want to put ladybirds on the edges, the ladybirds don’t venture more than 50 meters from the edge of the plot. Reaching the center of the plot doesn’t work. You can’t succeed if you simply reduce chemical inputs. Farmers aren’t stupid; if they reduce inputs without changing the size of their plots, they won’t succeed. It just doesn’t work. So Ecophyto isn’t working. In the areas – I’m more familiar with the North-East, in the Vosges – the Vosges used to be working-class farmers. They left. So now you have battalions of spruce trees that are pouring into the fields and meadows, closing the landscape. Don’t think this is better for biodiversity, just because spruce trees have been planted and paid for by the national forestry fund. Today, they’re dying of bark beetle because of the drought. A new thing came out in 1990-1995: the blurring of the landscape with urbanisation of the rural. You observe see this in the Forez nature park. Housing developments are build because there’s an opportunity, and the landscape quality of the villages is destroyed by letting houses grow just anywhere, anyhow. I’m showing you this, adapted to agriculture, but as I’ve worked more on terraces, these are more images of terraces. You can see what it looks like. Not very far from there, but I wouldn’t say where, you have these large plots of land that have been laid out with huge embankments, and which therefore are full of erosion. You’ll see later. Elsewhere, an area where there was a fire, where there were terraces that had been abandoned. So the landscape was closed, until it burnt down. The blurring of the landscape: this is above Nice, a small enclave that remains, with a beautiful vineyard. I come back to the plot I mentioned earlier. You can see how this model of more intense, larger-scale agriculture is mostly done with more oil. These benches – they are not terraces, they are benches – were made with bulldozers. The plots are quite large. I’ll tell you why: in this region, the farmers had hillsides that had never been cultivated. They had vineyards at the bottom of the hill. There was a flat area below, with water. The sun reflected much more on the water below, which helped to produce quite a lot. They even produced decent Muscat, but there was a constraint: there was an appellation that had a limit in terms of production per hectare. They produced a lot more, since there was water and sunshine and they said to themselves: “It’s a bit of a shame to throw away our surplus grapes. We’re going to give ourselves more surface area”. This area was just for vineyards. It produces, it doesn’t produce – that doesn’t matter. Even if it doesn’t produce, it still allows to get rid of the surplus quotas they had in the vineyards below. It’s in an area not far from where there were major floods in the 1990s. Sorry, I don’t remember the name. See what kind of erosion there is after a rainstorm. Not far from this area, one day, as we were working on this book on terrace landscapes, we asked a photographer to work with us. He brought back this rather surprising image with rows of vines. This alignment of vines, it had a powerful quality. We ask him where it was. You see, there are two rows of vines, a small embankment, two rows of vines, a small embankment, two rows of vines, a small embankment. It’s easter to understand from an aerial view. All this landscaping was done by M. Millot. I give you his name because at the time he was the only one in his region to do this, along with his father. He explained to us that he had done this with his father, who had built terraces with dry stone walls and knew the importance of water. If there’s too much water, it destroys the walls. So he drew up a plan together with a surveyor and his father. And with a bulldozer – he asked a guy to do it – you can see how he arranged each of the talwegs, to the right and to the left, so that he could make a return trip without having to maneuver too much. It didn’t take him any longer to make a return trip here than it did on the upper plot, which was straight and had a small flat area. While we were talking to him, we asked: "This is a brilliant thing you’re doing, it looks great, but why did you leave all these trees?" You can see that there are trees on the first bench, up there, and there are some on the right and on the left. He told us : “No, I didn’t leave them, I planted them!". In the years 1980-90, finding a winegrower who tells you that he had planted trees in the middle of his vineyards was a bit surprising to us. We asked him why. He explained that in the vineyard on the upper plot he had planted a sort of hedge to catch the water that comes from above. It was a plot that was useless as a vineyard, but still very useful because it allowed to redirect the water, which was either pumped by the trees or directed on either side towards the talwegs. Then each of the lower plots only had to deal with the water that poured down on them, and as they were slightly sloping, they redirected the water right and left into the talwegs. There were trees on the border as well. He explained all this to us. We are a bit in awe and he added: “You know, in the evening, when I’ve just finished my day, I come here and watch. It’s like a Chinese shadow, with behind the Dentelles de Montmirail. And at the end, I am happy. I like it. This is what I am going to leave behind. My vineyard is good.” He sold to the cooperative and didn’t particularly value the quality of the landscape he was producing, unlike others who were destroying it and who had alienated the elected representatives and the locals. It was a tourist area and people were asking them: Why are you destroying the quality of a landscape that attracts tourists? But Millot was in the cooperative, like all the others, and he wasn’t earning more until Ségolène Royal, then Minister of the Environment, labelled a hundred or so small regions on the idea of ‘Product quality, Landscape quality’. We made sure his wine estate was labeled. But he continued to sell his grapes to the cooperative. Except that the co-op put Mr. Millot’s farm on the cover in its documents to say that they all worked in a similar way. But you can see how in this area, the slightly intensive production of the farms at the top that I showed you before, has failed. In other words, there were elected representatives who said that it was causing erosion, that it wasn’t great, that it was ugly. So they got the whole hill declared a protected forest. Protected forest means that it can no longer be cultivated, it is blocked off for farming. Unfortunately, in the years that followed, as this is an area where quite a few tourists pass through, there were two or three successive fires. It was a total failure. Where these new areas were kept open, it was also a failure because there was erosion. From an environmental point of view, intensive agriculture or protected areas, without any management behind them, are failures. In the middle, you had Monsieur Millot who became a kind of role model. In other regions, in the Priorat – since you’re in the wine business, you’re probably familiar with it – there’s a mixture of vineyards, almond trees and olive groves, which also makes for some quite remarkable landscapes. I’ve already mentioned the Douro, a magnificent UNESCO World Heritage landscape. What are the principles of a landscape approach in agriculture? What I’m trying to say, from everything I’ve told you so far, is that you have to be able to reconnect with the history of each place. Each territory is a unique landscape, with its own geology and climate. It’s absolutely essential to regain a very detailed knowledge of these territories. I’m saying this for vintners in general – you know this better than the rest of the farmers because you’re very much involved: stick to it, there are historical resources, the elders, the history, the geography and the men who did it. The second point is: you have to involve the local people. If you want to work on a project for the future, it won’t just be the farmers who make their plans. Farmers have their skills, of course, they’re the ones who work and therefore they are essential, but today we’re in a new context. We need to find a link with biodiversity issues and also with climate issues, since we are goint to have to adapt or reduce production. To do that, we need to encourage multiple land use, which is what we had before. Soil must be capable of producing both agricultural products and water. Soil must act as a filter to produce clean water and also biodiversity. You can’t have intensive agriculture on one side, and then Natura 2000 areas further away. All these things have to work together. Also, with regards to the new needs of a society that mostly lives in the city, it needs places to relax. Efforts must be made to organise these spaces to meet their demands. The last point: when we talk about landscape, there’s always this notion of beauty. Don’t be afraid. Of course, when I was in ministries and when we talked about beauty, people used to say that the Ministry of the Environment was the Ministry of Clouds, the landscape is the clouds – that’s not ok. But yes, we have to talk about beauty. That’s how we’re going to get there. It’s a need for the people, for the population, the farmers and for yourself. You have to be able to talk about it and describe the project you have for tomorrow – I was saying that landscape is a question of project – well you have to express it. Chateau Chalon. Here, they’ve stuck to the knowledge of their specificity. The soil is from the Lias, which only supports Savagnin, and with that they make a something magnificent, which is yellow wine. They did some land consolidation, but very, very carefully. They had just grouped two or three plots together to make it easier for the farmers to work and to avoid their plots being all over the place. They had worked on the accesses to bring the equipment. But they remained very careful to keep their culture, which was part of their AOC. Involving agricultural and non-agricultural communities. You need to have water experts in your collective today. Before, there were the GVA where there were only farmers, the ‘agricultural extension groups’. Now you have to include biodiversity specialists and water specialists. And elected representatives, because they obviously have things to say. Some examples. Hortus, in Alsace. Loudun. Hortus was a farm that was supposed to benefit from the Fontevraud landscape Charter. The multiple use of land. Soils contains biodiversity. Grass strips are just one example. The paths you see, a wine trail, but it’s not just wine trails, of course. Wine tourism in the vineyards. Vintners from Soultzmatt, the noble valley. Look on their wine trails, they say: “Every Thursday, tour accompanied by a vintner”. The vintners take the tourists along. It usually ends up in the cellar, so they don’t lose much. Except now, they’re even more clever. The tasting takes place on this plot, with a particular wine, or another grape variety further on. You can make people understand the link between the terroir and the quality of the wine. Dare to talk about beauty. The Côte de Beaune. You had this type of wall to fight against erosion, which dates back to the modern period. Some farmers were given grants to rebuild dry stone walls. They realised that these dry stone walls were functionally much better than concrete walls. What’s more, they were more solid. Today, they are communicating about it. One day, on the subway in Paris, I saw this poster. When you farmers work on beauty, it’s not a losing game. You see this poster. I am showing it to you because it was created by Bourgogne Tourisme. Burgundy tourism is promoting the quality of the landscape created by vintners. They don’t say that they make wine, because they’re not allowed to advertise, but they show the quality of the landscape. It’s free, so it’s beneficial for everyone. So a fortnight later, I found this. Champagne vineyards 1 hour from Paris. Again, it’s tourism, Champagne. I said to myself: “Well, maybe one day there will be one about Brittany”. And then, one day, Brittany. But for Brittany, it was the seaside with the little house by the seaside. And certainly not agriculture. I imagine that the communicators know that advertising in the subway on Breton agriculture today is completely counterproductive. I have nothing against Breton farmers, because there are certainly some very pretty places, but in general you can’t say that their agriculture is a success, either in terms of the quality of the landscapes or the quality of the products, with their pigs all over the place. Give people something to see and feel. Product quality, environmental quality, biodiversity. The quality of the welcome, since you often sell direct. And the quality of the landscape. All this can be expressed in different ways, but above all by getting out into the field, taking city residents and consumers outside. The penultimate photo was taken in Val d’Aosta, where was held a conference and we went for a drink on the terraces, which are magnificent, of course. What you keep as a souvenir afterwards is that. If I drink Aosta wine, that’s what stays in my mind. I drink these landscapes. Of course, when you see it, it makes an impression and we don’t all have the same type of landscapes, I admit. But you all have beautiful landscapes to highlight in your jobs, in connection with the nature you’ve worked with.