Expérience de terrain – polyculture & permaculture
(sous-titres en français et anglais)
par Jean-François Agut
(Agriculteur et viticulteur à la Ferme de Jean-François Agut – Sud-Ouest/France)
Jean-François Agut partage avec pédagogie son expérience précieuse et pragmatique autour de la polyculture et permaculture sur la ferme viticole familiale, qui bien qu’elle ne soit pas en bio, est un véritable modèle pour la biodiversité.
Vignoble & Biodiversité #1 – La viticulture de demain commence aujourd’hui
12 & 13 mai 2022 – 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 #sciencesouvertes #biodiversité #agriculture #transmission #openscience #permaculture #polyculture #agroecologie #changementclimatique
I am not a pioneer in organic farming, but it is certain that I have taken a path that copies the living and what nature wants to do. A fairly succinct presentation of my farm. It’s not very important, it’s just to give you a short overview on my agronomic situation. Finally, I will tell you about my experience and how I have adapted techniques that today we call agroecological, but which are rather common sense amongst farmers. In fact, I came from an agricultural training where I was explained how we could fight against diseases, fight against insects, against grass, against… there we go! So this is today’s agricultural education, the one I received. But I’m curious and I always think about how I find myself in a particular situation. And in fact, all the problems I had to deal with, or at least most of them, I caused. So when people talk to me about herbicide resistance, it’s my fault. All I had to do is not to use them. Soil compaction, drop in yields, increase in production costs: in fact, I am the origin – through my practices or those that I was taught – of the difficulties that I have to manage. So, at some point, we have to take stock and try to understand what is wrong with our reasoning. And in fact, the ‘rosette’ function doesn’t work on us, it’s quite complicated, even though it would be the easiest. Or at least that we have trainings that better integrate this living world, the one from which we were born. Since we are made of it, we are elements of this biodiversity. We are not going to talk about philosophy, but it is already very important to consider ourselves as an actor and member of this biodiversity, and not to consider the vine as a plant, a support, a tool or something to gain money from. It’s much more complex than that. And so, in the journey that I took, I have been inspired by nature and some essential laws. The law of weightlessness, of everything that is magnetism, attraction, changes of electrons, things like that. These are things that have always interested me. It’s a very simple way to understand how plants grow and how we live, how our cells work. All these functions are linked to electromagnetic laws and are the genesis of this living world. Homeostasis, I wish we talked about that a lot more lately. But you probably know it: ‘any living system left alone, in the absence of disturbances, returns to a state of equilibrium through a series of processes that we call regulatory processes.’ In fact, it is our capacity for resilience, the way in which we will adapt to external aggressions. It is from this law that I will try as much as possible to draw inspiration from myself to trust the living, the system, to repair itself. So I don’t want to fight anymore. Another law: any function that is replaced atrophies. When we use fertilizers or things like that, we understand that the natural fertility that we are trying to bring back to our soil takes on its full meaning. Doesn’t the way I work on my plots, with products or things like that, ultimately generate problems that I will have to deal with later? I will pass quickly, but I will explain to you that my journey was to understand, to ultimately know, what was the origin of what: am I going to have beautiful plants by working on my soil, or is it to have good soil, do I need beautiful plants? In fact, this whole path of biology is both. It is also true to say that you need good soil to have beautiful plants, that to have good plants you need beautiful soil. You have to nourish this soil, because this soil ultimately nourishes itself, it has a biology, and this biology feeds on sugars. Sugar is photosynthesis. These are the root exudates that come from photosynthesis, so they define as plants. There is all this biology that gets underway. So this is how I tried to construct my reasoning. I’m going over this quickly, just to explain how soil is built. The biological balance that is established at the beginning, when you start from rock, it may be one or two bacteria which will begin to produce some support on which two or three fungi will arrive. Then finally, they will create environments and species – first it will perhaps be lichen, then moss, and then some grasses, until we get to a forest. And here too, to attract your attention, how can we go the other way round. In other words, our heritage is forest soils, these are fertile soils, fertile soils which unfortunately, through our agricultural practices, we are in the process of destroying or which we have already destroyed. So ultimately, we are weakening our biological heritage. And the outcome of that is the reconstruction of the desert. I don’t want to be alarmist, but these are things that are established today. Climate change is not going to help us. So it is important to me, in my reasoning, to integrate soil cover into this logic, to nourish biological life and to try to grow crops with this substance. Here we are already changing our reasoning. The first effects of this change in philosophy are: do I have weeds, or do I have utility plants? When I install a plant cover, I do it by direct sowing and I already use what is actually in place. In fact, I observe: what do the plants tell me and what is my soil suffering from, what is it trying to do, what function is this or that plant trying to achieve? And so ultimately my plant cover, which can be made up of several species, will mix with weeds. There you have a ravenelle on the left and mustards on the right. These are completely native plants but which, as a result, are put into competition, through this game of competition, begin to seek light and therefore produce biomass. And finally, they actually become service plants. Here too, another weed, another plant which can be considered as a weed in the vines, is Spotted Medick, medicago arabica. It was Lucien Séguy who questionnend me about the interesting role of this plant. Ultimately, my logic was to take the alternative or the opposite of glyphosate. Glyphosate is still used on the farm, but you have understood that it won’t be there for much longer. And I didn’t wait for a government decision to change that. This does not go in the direction of biology, so are there plants which will fulfill this function, that is to say to limit the competition of this plant during the vegetative cycle, but which will have a winter cycle. And Spotted Medick works like this. It will appear in the vineyard in October. It is not sown – I specify that it is not sown. It’s just that I let it express itself in its natural environment. I did not try to control it, neither mechanically nor chemically. I didn’t think it would give this result. I thought it would cause a few spots here and there, but in fact, the plant managed to colonize the entire row. And that’s a few months later, in June. Finally, all this mulch dried without the use of weedkiller. So I found it interesting to explore this path, and I did it with other plants. So, since this Spotted Medick is present naturally, but not everywhere on my farm, I looked for plant seeds that had this function. So forage legumes with an alternative cycle, and these were underground clovers, quite strategic, therefore zero herbicides. What impressed me was to see how quickly life returns to green cover like that. It’s something that just happens. I could tell you that it works everywhere, but that’s not true. We are playing with the living. So there are situations where you will sow them in the fall, but ultimately, for climatic reasons, they will instead grow in spring. And there, you will have the opposite phenomenon, that is to say that you will have a plant which will have a summer cycle and which will dry out in September. And finally, you have it in competition with the vine, in competition on the water level, I mean. So there’s the next part. It’s been 6 years now that the vines and plots have been managed like this. And from this photo that you saw earlier – this one I took before coming – that’s how it is today. We can hardly guess the vines anymore. But that’s it, it will start to settle very quickly because it is reaching flowering. In three weeks, it will begin to settle and finish drying. This is followed closely, since once again, we are playing with the living, we are talking about water competition and all that, but also about the transfer of mineral elements. When we talk about competition, we have to know if ultimately water is the limiting factor in the green cover we have under the row, or if it is something else. Today, I measure with the sap juices what is missing in my plant, comparing it with control plots that are weeded or worked, or things like that, to see. Ultimately, there is a lot to say about this, but it will be a much more technical subject and will take longer to develop. I did the same thing with ryegrass. Today, through the use of weedkillers, we have ryegrasses that are resistant. At my farm, you could put 10 liters of glyphosate – it’s prohibited, but hey, I’m just joking – but you won’t go very far with it. The ryegrass will change color, but it will finish its cycle sooner or later. All we did was delaying it’s cycle. And by delaying it, you will prolong this competitive situation a little longer over time. I took the option that if I’m in a plot that has a ryegrass problem, I will let it go into grain as quickly as possible. And eventually it will dry. And in June it’s the same: I have my ryegrass which has dried and which is no longer a competitor. Another species present on the farm is the vulpie. It’s fabulous because it’s very allopathic. It’s not very competitive. On the other hand, it’s a pioneer plant, it controls all the others. So ultimately, you do not need to intervene. And this is the same, it’s not like this everywhere. We could have fun sowing them, but I haven’t looked into the subject yet. This is an example, I put some pictures to bring in the subjects. The subject: when we talk about green cover, when we talk about soil ratios and when we seek to increase fertility, we must not confuse it with fertilization. Today, my fertilization reasoning is that there is a part for the green cover which will reorganize the mineral elements if it’s a mineral contribution, but today, it has been four or five years since this only organic fertilizer, so that restitution can take place and the fertility pump can begin. Here too, I’m putting you in my context, my production objectives: it exceeds 100 hectoliters per hectare, 120, so I actually need the plants to be vigorous. And when we install them, when we talk about competition, in fact I’m even more subject to competition, since I’m very demanding agronomically with my plants. So here is. We were talking this morning about the flowers in the vineyards. I put them everywhere. I put them everywhere, because I seek to improve through biodiversity, I seek to diversify the composition of my green cover so that each plant which is present on this plot contributes to and nourishes a part of biology. We now know that the root exudates of the fava bean are different from those of oats, of rye or even of vetch. And so, each time, their characteristics feed a different biology. We’re losing this diversity on single-species covers, and that’s a shame. Unfortunately, this is something I see too often and it is not a criticism, but I think we need to take the approach further. When we install a green cover, we are no more skillful than what nature does, which by the way never sows a single species in its soil. We must therefore try to copy this system and its resilience. I’m talking about flowers again. These are also photos that I took before coming here. I’m on something very flowery, with lots of bees and pollinators. So if we ask ourselves how we could ultimately preserve this biodiversity: well, let’s play with nature. Since I respect this biodiversity and the species that live in it, I will adapt my farming practices to respect these individuals. So ultimately, I never work plots like that during the day, I work them at night, and I stagger the sowing of floral species so that once my plants have reached the end of flowering, there are borders, like here , which take over and my pollinators can go to the borders. In fact, I’m going to keep them away from my plots. So the decrees and all that, it’s not that I don’t care about them, but we are a little more evolved than being ruled by decrees. So we go a little further, we’re going to plant trees. I think this is a subject that will be discussed a lot during these two days because indeed, we need bats to enter our plots. The fact that there are no trees or things like that means that they don’t move away from the edges, they don’t go inside the plots. I needed to recreate relief and therefore be consistent there too. So there are a whole bunch of species that are planted, mostly fruit species, but also trees, so that there is a little bit of everything. Where I live, it’s quite boggy, there are natural hedges, there are riparian forests, it’s pretty much diversified but in fact, there are still 40 or 50 years of agriculture that have gone through there. And there was damage done. Today, I am constantly looking to plant trees, every year. I redefine plots with tree borders, so that there is the function of the tree, so that it is not just a function of providing shade or interfering with my crops, but in fact, the tree is so many things. And that too, I imagine, will be mentioned, but the notion of perch is also important. Not just because it brings in raptors who will eat a few field mice which could harm certain cultures, but it is also a perch which will shelter a migratory bird which will bring biology from elsewhere. And I am looking to improve the farms’ fertility. It’s Hervé, who will be giving a talk tomorrow, who has made me very aware of this. These are testimonies which are very very important, and above all very effective. So that’s the hedge today. It’s growing, it’s growing quickly and that’s good. Well, I am a multi-crop farmer, a livestock farmer and all that, and when you have a biodiversity approach, you naturally move away from monoculture. The vine, despite everything, remains a monoculture. And this monoculture quickly caused me problems when I saw the fodder value of the species that were present in my vineyard. Because there were forage legumes, there were cereals, there were grasses, there were a whole bunch of things that are ultimately meals for ruminants. So I practice vitipastoralism. There on the left, it’s just an experiment that I carried out on a plot that was agronomically in distress, where I brought a ration of carbon to see the effects, to measure a little how quickly it would be able to progress in terms of fertility. And it was a pretty conclusive test. The other importance of grazing plots is that you have mixtures: that is my medicago arabica which is trying to establish itself and which is in competition with ryegrass. Ryegrass is quite dominant there, at this time of year and it turns out that the tannins of medicago arabica are not very palatable for sheep. So they will only eat grasses. The result is that there are no more grasses and the medicago arabica will take hold and eventually cover my soil, and I no longer need to work the soil. With that, we no longer need to talk about competition. It will dry at the end of May and so I have a cover, I have a mulch on my floor which will protect it from UV. So I no longer use tools. And that was a logic that I tried to achieve. I wish it could be everywhere like that. But here, I move forward in step with nature. And it’s important to respect that too. For the moment, not everything is in place, but things are progressing. Another element that I wanted to evoke is this human fertility. It is thanks to people like this, that I was able to acquire knowledge and ultimately progress, since I had been, let’s say, ‘distorted’ from this living world by my agricultural education. And today, I grow up with people like that and ultimately with people like you, because when we come together in a session like this, we have a lot of moments of exchange and sharing of experiences. And ultimately, it also contributes to progress. There you go, I made a fairly succinct presentation to save time.