What is a desert?
A desert is a tranquille place for tourists and scientists.
A desert is also a place where the soil has been destroyed by wrong agricultural pratices :
- agriculture : the australian desert, the Rub Al Khali of Oman and Saoudia … agriculture after burning by the aborigenes and the ancient of Arabia, over exploitation, ploughing, nude lands with no culture, systemic erosion, laterisation, climate accelerator and watering… overwatering can salinize the ground… like in Babylon the cradle of the cereals.
- cattle : the Sonora desert in Mexico and Texas, the Piura desert in Peru… in the XVIIIth century Sonora was a forest, quickly cut to support the American industrial revolution and produce meat… on the other size of the Americas, when Aimé Bomplan, the botanist of Louis the XVth arrives on the coasts of Piura, he describes a tropical forest…
A desert can also be a field in which the soil does not hold anymore his foundamental role : exchange water, oxygen, minerals, metals,… thanks to the bacterias, fungis and more evoluate life such as worms etc.
Why it does not play this role anymore? Mainly because of ploughing which brakes all this fungic net, as well as killing the bacteria bringing them upside down. (suffocating the bactera that need air by sending them deep under, bringing at surface the ones who fear oxygen) …
A second cause would be the use of organochorides such as herbicides, which combat fungis and bacterias as well as the vegetaion covering the soil except the plants which have been modified to resist them.
A desert stand not only for sand and rocks: Along the fields of Picardie we found often Ambrosia artemisiifolia flourishing, a plant originating from the desert mounts of Afghanistan, which indicates soil destructuration.
When the soil does not play his role, water stagnates or run away at the surface whashing up away all the organic matter it can, creating erosion… the first step to desertification.
Our job, is to reconstruct the soil with the help of nature and a little knowledge and experience! This is what agriculture design is about.