Les Foodingues

Jean Ziegler just published “the geopolitic of famine”.
As International civil servant and consultant, Mr Ziegler is a good man trying to keep the world famine in focus of the rich countries.

These experts have done so all their life in the XXth century, while famine reached its utmost record level, spreading in their own country. Today they indignate themselves without putting to trial their own responsability.

Jean Ziegler takes for example the Bambara peasant in Mali, who gets a 100 time less wheat crop than in Ohio. For Ziegler it comes from the lack of fertilizer.

Ziegler has the reflexes of his century, but I’m afraid the problem relies elsewhere. The problem is ideological, brought by westernized agronomic engineers who try to contamitate the spirit of peasants they consirder uncult, without trying to find out local solutions. Tilling the soil and spraying it with fertilizers, is just like supporting “hydroponic” agriculture : to apply the same formula without giving a damn to the local richness of the soil. Agriculture and nature is not at all approached, under its’ scientific side, but with all the ideology needed to sell more fertilizers from the rich countries.
All that to grow wheat, an international market monoculture, while the aim is to make food localy… For this purpose wheat can be considered as a starvation crop in comparison to amaranth 3 times more nutritiv… without speaking of all the local and varied alternativs.

If they need fertilizers they have termite soil : termites digest together with the mycelium they crop, all the organic matter to make the most complex sugars which are considered as the richest fertilizer on earth. In temperate countries we have lombric compost, in Africa we have termite compost. But beware it is extremely powerfull. To much of it kills, like too much luxury. You need to control the amount by watching the biodindicator plants to be sure not to produce nitrites and aluminites which will contaminate your food and which are the cause in Europe of nervous syndroms as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, etc. Unless you want to develop a drug industry to remediate your foul doings, and make more money.
Remember also that the chemical fertilizers are mostly salts. They already have a desert why do you want to ad salt to their fate. The crucial problem for the Bambara in Mali is climate change,with the access to water.
Here the proble is more ignorance than drought :  “Man’s head drought” as they say in Mali.
But water should not be a problem today. At SOS SOiL, Alain Gachet with his reading of the NASA’s radar satellite images, has find the sustainable table water for the Darfour refugees. These water tables are a real kick for agriculture… But the agronomic exploitors use it to plant their GMO seeds and spread their chemistry… Most of the plans for aid for Africa to fight famine art the last Copenhagen Conference, where trials in big of manipulated seeds forbidden in the North.
Mr Ziegler, I know you are a good man. It maybe time to draw conclusions in the thinking process you are using : it is a good thing to indignate yourself just before retiring. It could be more wise to switch methods, instead of promoting machinery, chemistry and hard work to develop the poor man’s agriculture. Look for more sustainable plans nourrished by local ressources, creativity and permanent soil cultivation and self enrichment : a smarter agriculture.
This especially for someone who has dedicated his life to development in a time when malnutrition raised by 1000. It is time to open new trails, instead of trying to justify old lost crusades. Remember people are starving as you talk.

Dont see any polemic n this post : by speaking of Ziegler I speak about hunger and the fight against it. Plato who knew Anaxamander, the first guy to calculate the circumference of the earth when everybody thought it was flat, 600 years BC, Plato nether spoke about him, to avoid any publicity he could give him. To ignore Anaxamander was a way to kill the theory of a round planet turning arounf the sun, in the egg. By doing so, Plato killed Giordano Bruno .

What IS that? An eel caught by an abyssal net? A space Hoover cleaning up planet Mars?
In fact, it is a nematode, a micrometric worm trapped by the mycelium of a mushroom. This image has been taken with an electronic microscope by Pr H.H. Triantaphyllou for the American Phytopathological Society, in St Paul, Minnesota.

To face this microworm, France has replied by creating a vine genetically modified to resist nematodes. While all eyes were focusing on the “Grenelle de l’environnement”, the brand new environmental laws being voted by Parliament in France on May the 18th 2010, the ministers of agriculture and of the environment have authorized the planting of GMO vineyards, in Colmar, Alsace.

For sure, some nematodes are vegetarian and harm plants when they penetrate the roots, while inoculating them with viruses like the grape vine fanleaf virus, which stops the vine to produce grapes. This is sad indeed, but this is nature. On planet earth small nematodes are eaten by big nematodes. Even if they are discreet, they are part of the balance of a whole food chain. As we see on the photo, nematodes are also food for some mushrooms, as for bacterias, arthropodes, micro spiders, worms…

The nematode eats bacterias, protozoas, other nematodes and transforms organic matters. It does the crucial role of digesting whatever makes soil, from vegetal to animal… no nematodes means the proliferation of potentially pathogenic micro organisms for plants and bacterias potentially harmfull for man.

There are more than a million species of nematodes. If you dont have small nematodes anymore, the big ones will go elsewhere and here starts the catastrophy. If some attack the plant roots, others mineralize the organic matter to make it fertile for plants; while the carnivorous ones regulate the global nematode population. Their main job is to liberate at the root level, the nitrogene needed in a digestable form for the plant; a vital role in the creation of a rich soil.

So why did the French ministers declared war to these micro-organisms?

Nematodes become pathogenous in an unbalanced soil.

In a compacted soil, big nematodes cant travel anymore. The little vegetarian ones can play freely with their bunch of viruses. The soil of a vineyard is generally compacted by regularly tilling in betwin vine rows, destructuring the soil and compacting it like a tart batter, year after year. We brake the roots leaving them bare to any attack. We spread its’ sap to attract all the nematodes of the area allowing them to enter freely directly inside the roots. We brake as well the balance of the soil, its’ bacterial and fungal life which feed on nematodes. Better than a disneyland, we create a fantastic recreational park for vegetarian nematodes.

In the past 40 years we taught farmers to fight chemically against anything they could :

With herbicides… but wherever you have a nematode invasion, you have anti nematodes plants growing spontaneously like the marygold Tagettes minuta, which you can also sow. The herbicide on his side will kill everything, this making no details. But you have always plants resisting, which are not always the most usefull them …

With fongicides : there are more 13 cryptogamic diseases brought by fungi and yeasts, that terror the farmer like the brown or powdery mildew. Biologists have not found better defense against these mushrooms than other mushrooms, which by associating with the vine, boost its production, while exchanging with the plant natural antibiotics and enzimes that enhance their immunitary defences.
But when you tell someone who lost his crop because of a mushroom, that a mushroom can help him, hee is freaking. It is understandable.

In fact with the genetically modified vine we can stay in our tranquille ignorance of the soil web; buy more cloned GMO plants and give the state its’ commision via the INRA (French National Agriculture Institute). Among the million species of nematodes straying in our soil, some will finally adapt to the GMO clones. They are more than 200 million years old, they will survive us… And the vineyards planted with identical clones will all get the disease at the same time… What a better business than having to replant the whole French vineyards once for all?

I drink to our great marketting geniuses, agronomists and politicians; with French wine of course, it is still time.

Look at this other picture : Here is a nematode finally free to enter swiftly in a root. Cheers.

It depends on the one you need. If it’s a low-level one, it might be even a matter of hours. Of course, if we are talking about MBA papers, then it will take longer. However, you will be pleased with our quick terms of fulfillment.

Take a look at these splendid potatoes… more than 3000 varieties, one for everyday, for the next 10 years…

But now you will get the transgenic “duke of York”, the GMO “King Edward”… the GMO “British Queen”…

Excellent… the brand new Royal GMO potato family brought to you by the incredible mad hatter… no, no, sorry, stop. Where is “Prince Charles”?

I wanted to talk about the new potato collection prepared for you by the icon of transgenic labs, the Sainsbury foundation of England. It has succeeded to get the GREEN light (dont laugh) to plant them, as test, behind barbled wired high fences, under high security and arms. One must remind that this Sainsbury lab has nothing to do with the supermarket chain of the same name, the first big chain to kick away GMOs from their shops.

Transgenic what for? To resist blight, the desease which provoqued the Irish famine, the allmighty scarecrow to pass any GMO in the UK. Transgenic as well to resist to nematods, the little invisible worms eating the potatoes before we do. Of course each transgenic potato has its’ own specialty, you cannot get all at a time, choose your disease comrad…

How glorious it is to see that the same tricks and recipies still work like in the old time, use fear to swallow something even more dreadfull; cuddling intelligence by tetanizing it, a good old tradition of warriors to tackle good sens with terror.

Save the world from famine? defend our crops from climate change? This is what the GMO fans of Albion are running for. They chose their defender of the moment in the person of Lord Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency; who better?. The eminent former member of government, daring and utmost sympathetic, the first politician to declare his homosexuality and seroposivity at the parliament, an event at the time. A man of guts. He is now testing the British public opinion on GMOs. What a wierd political communication strategy: the “Queer” of transgenic to rescue the GMO “Queen”, before the great battle in Brussels to be led by the European governments and pro GMO Manuel Barroso. Perfide Albion.

GMOs have to pass at any cost… Potato so easy to replant and multiply… it has to be controled totally by BASF and the other true serious corporations.

Biologists know perfectly well that Blight is a mushroom and that any mushroom can be controled by another mushroom; when you use the oyster mushroom mycelium for example, you also boost your potato crop. As for nematodes are killed by Tagetes Minuta, a plant that grows everywhere on the planet and particularly in association with the potato. It would be interesting to give some basic information about botanics to the farmers… they are supposed to deal with plants everyday, but they dont know the basics. They are not the only ones, but sometimes we can ask ourselves if it is not so on purpose.

Nature is jolly well done, isnt it? But if farmers start to think like this, they wont buy any drugs from any company. How can you milk a farmer if he starts to do so? How can you finance our good old European corporations, sustain solid infrastructures, get a serious political class? Say, where would go our world if it was free to do what it wanted? If peasants were free to produce their own seeds, fertilizers and remedies?

To feed the world? in reality the target is rather confused :

“A star(ch) is born” announces BASF, with its legendary German humour. Starch, yes; to make your paper more glossy, your Savile Row suite even more stif, your threads shiny. 20 years now, that they have been working on selecting the starch potato from potatoes they croped in Mexico and Peru. Biopiratry? What are you talking about? They are true researchers who have created a potato, a “novel” product. To show that it is THEIR OWN creation, they inoculated to it a marker gene. Here the marker is a gene resistant to antibiotics protecting us against E. Coli and other agents provocateurs of nosocomial diseases. Thanks.

Yes you read well, they inoculated a potato with a gene resistant to the antibiotic kanamycine, the antibiotic which helps us to survive from a bacterial disease, all this to recognize THEIR POTATO, which they have patented.

They named the potatoe amFLORA, probably for its beautiful flowers (flora in latin). Because it makes flowers, which is the traditionnal way to select and intercross the genes.

“My dear MPs, potato has also its’ sexual life, it is no mystery”.

Ouch, what a coming out : it takes 20 years to obtain a new potato by crossing potato flowers and get proper seeds.

“This gene cannot be transmitted to man, because this potato is not for eating and the reproduction through flowers is neglectible”. They gave it as little name : amFLORA… strange German humour? Because pollen goes from one flower to another. It is so light, that a slight breeze can bring it up to the stratosphere. From there it can turn around the world and one day fall anywhere, maybe on a potato for man or a pig. Maybe it can seduce a pollinator… can you imagine the amount of pollen in thousands of hectares of potato fields needed by the industry?

The Sainsbury lab, seems more pragmatic: “why wait 20 years to create a blight or nematod resistant potato when we can stick the gene right away?” Life is so simple. But in the first hand, why spending so much money on a problem which has been solved with success for more than 2000 years? You only need to know about it? Sorry for the XIXth century Irishmen. You need to teach the peasants. Why hide them the truth? Three cheers for BIODIVERSITY. One must learn from it and use it.

Hopefully we live in a wonderfull world… Farmers are claiming for a GMO free label, special to label the meat and the milk which is produced without feeding on imported trans soy from Brasil and Argentina for which we are the N°1 clients.

Lets forget for a while the pollen, the planet and its’ stratosphere, lets dream…

This announcement is not custom paper writing service from me… It is from Terrena, the biggest agro coop in France, one of the most important customer of agro chemical products in the world today…

It seems that after trying to produce always more with higher bills for chemicals, prepared seeds and big consumming tractors…

higher yields were hiding higher inputs, smaller profit margins. It is without counting with the good sens of the peasant, which seems to come back galopping for 2010.

A true hope for the evolution of food security and development…

Surprisingly, the principle of the trials we developed as a sustainable alternativ to corn cultivation in Argentina, Marocco and Ethiopia, has just been validated by 2 authorities : the Rothamsted Research lab pour for agriculture, a world reference, inventor of some of the most reputed pesticides an herbicides used everyday on this planet, and the French Goliath of agriculture the agro-coop Terrena.

What protocoles are we talking about? To plant a community of plants, mycelium and bacterias at the same time as the staple crop. These plants will allow the crops to get all the fertilizer needed, while displaying all kind of strategies to protect from pests and hydric stress which are getting worse with global warming. A direct seedling of corn together with a broadcast sowing of legumes and graminea, no tilling, 10 days before harvesting the crop in place, which will then create a mulch which will be inoculated by good fungi and bacteria, to be controlled by specific prebiotic crops. A folly when we think about granpa’s agriculture, which surrounds us everywhere; but you need to try to be convinced once for all.

The first authority to bring water to our mill, are the brilliant Cambridge professors and the scientists of the Rothamsted Lab, by saying that from now on we need to be inspired by nature, to keep into account plant sociology their complementarities in bringing fertilizers and fighting against pests. In doing so they have double, even in some places multiplied by six their crops during trials they made in Kenya, in the past six months.

The second, came from the coop Terrena they declared in their annual report : ” 2015, is the objective when we wont need fertilizer, pesticide, nor herbicide” … “we will fight against plant diseases with bio-control by using natural mechanisms, the bio-control will also allow us to fight efficiently against pests as well.” and further “by using plants, microbiology, tree hedges, Fragmented Rameal wood (BRF) and funghi…”

Never enough, what a great report the one of Terrena. A good start for 2010.

You could almost hear the applauses of 400 million years of evolution an mutual living of plants, before our intervention with pesticides and herbicides, in the last 40 years.

But now let me think : hopefully Copenhaguen was a flop… three cheers for Copenhaguen.

Cheer witticism of course. But just imagine if  Copenhaguen did not failed. Among all announced measures, huge sums of money would have been given to Africa to repeat the same pattern of Agriculture in place in Europe, USA and Japan, for the last two generations. A true catastrophy : responsible for 30% of greenhouse gases in the world ; to repeat this at the scale of the planet would have been a disaster causing a global famine.

Copenhaguen has succeeded though, because of the mediatic enthousiasm it has provoked in the heads of many scientists, who got the guts to make public different prospects. And it is difficult for a scientist to say this in public. Have you ever heard about a worm, a bacteria or a funghi, financing a research unit in a University?

Our leaders are not aware of the existence of such protocoles, nobody has told them about.

A doctorate thesis has just been propsed to the INRA (French National Institute for Agronomic Research) about sowing different complementary plants in a corn field. Does not seem to be accepted yet. Lets’ hope that the INRA unit of Angers in France will support this. We will see what 2010 will bring. All our hopes are with them.

This has been known for a long time now, but hasn’t been realy accepted by the agriculture authorities. Do you imagine today’s agriculture with no chemicals? Less heavy tractors and devices, less commerce for the cooperatives, the unions, less debt for the peasant, less investments for the agriculture finance authorities and banks…

The economic pattern en vogue is today rather on the side of Jacques Attali, advisor to the French President Sarkosy, former advisor to President Mitterrand : “We have not authorised for the time being, the use of GMOs. The products which are used to feed animals are becoming increasingly costly; so we will have to take a decision : will we accept GMOs, like everybody does in the world, or are ready to support the massive increase of the cost of our food?”

Is Mr Attali ignoring that while he is speaking, France is already number one importer of Brasilian transgenic soy to feed its’ cows? He is probably unaware of this article in Time Magazin which shows that if you decide to raise your cattle with grass you can save the planet? Lets’ repeat it once more: a cow eats grass, not corn, nor soy. A recurrent theme in this blog.

Mr. Jacques Attali, for me, is “Mr. tractor” : Wherever he goes, he preaches the distribution of tractors to everybody… Now we know that these tractors will be able to spray herbicides for which American GMO seeds have been designed to resist, “like everybody does in the world”, Oups… dont forget that the French are number 3 in the GMO race, but so small in volume in comparison.

When you think about it, it seems so incredible to have succeeded in convincing the peasant good sense, to spray herbicides, which kill plants, in order to get a better harvest of plant. People who have done this are geniuses of commerce, arent they? Bravo.

70% of GM crops have been modifies to resist to these herbicides; so to sell always more herbicide.
The remaining has been created in order to integrate the Bacillus of Thuringis BT, a micro organism which kils coleopteras, i.e. beetles. But the beetle can evolve (remember Darwin?) and become resistant to BT. It is a bit what happened in India where since 2006 more than 200 000 peasants took on a credit to by BT seeds. The crops could not be harvested, destroyed by pest and diseases. 200 000 peasants committed suicide.

Bees now… in France, in the UK, Spain, or Marocco, 2/3 of the bee population in 2003 have disappeared in the 3 last years. People pointed on the new pesticides just put into action at this time; fair enough a pesticide is designed to kill insects, isn’t it? In France the INRA, our national watchdog, doute encorestill emits doubts. Through the French Association for Scientific Information and its’ Jan-March 2010 issue “Sciences and fake Sciences”, the doubt is maintained onthe role of insecticides to kill bee (bees are insects, remember). The solution proposed? BT GMOs, but Mr. scientist for agriculture, if the peasants commit suicide, will there be any agriculture left?

Potatoe : January 2010 Leeds University ask for the authorisation to plant GM potatoe in a Yorkshire field. They have modified a potatoe to resist to nematods, microscopic worms which have been living in the environment of potatoes for millions of years.
When you plant in the same space different cultivars of potatoes, if ever attacked a potatoe immediatly announces it to the others, which immediatly provoque an invasion of microorganisms which in turn eradicate the problem and feed on the nematodes. If you still have potatoes infested by nematodes today, it is more because of the way potatoes are cultivated. If ever you modifie them, you risk to take away the memory of how they can defend itself, which has been acquired by million of years of evolution. What is the point? These scientists dream that they will get a lot of money by selling to everybody in England their seed… Dont they remember the Irish famine was caused by the cultivation of one single type potatoe which has not been able to resist a mushroom, because it had forgotten about its existence?

This is grave. They are playing with the food security of millions of people. And now I take my cap of co-creator of the project “t’ikapapa” in Peru, together with A&L biodiversidad in Lima. “T’ikka papa” means “potato flower” in quechua. This project brought back the importance of the biodiversity of potatoe. How important it is to cultivate 320 varieties of potatoes at least, while securing to 8000 small farmers in the Andes the distribution in the Wong supermarkets, i.e. where the Peruvian elites are shopping and where they are ready to give a fair price to an extraordinary potatoe, to a true jewel. Our project won the 2006 FAO Gold medal (Food and Agriculture Organisation), the 2007 SEED AWARD from the United Nations and the BBC WORLD CHALLENGE FOR DEVELOPMENT 2007.

In the Andes, the wild potatoe grows among tagetes, the plant tagetes minuta, the common marigold, the anti nematode plant. Here you can see a wild potatoe in its original biotope, where we just took away dry tagets to take the photo. You find it right on the surface of the soil or beneath no more than 5cm. The tagetes essential oil avoid the development of these micro worms and provoques the presence of their predators.

It is simple. In the Andes, when you are on a terrain propitius to wild potatoe, a sandy soil close to a river, which is covered with dryed tagetes minuta, you bend to the soil and scrape it gently, potatoes are generally there. To be sure you’d better check previously in summer if you see any of the beutiful potatoe flowers in the area.

This is the original home of the potatoe. Tagetes minuta and potatoe have sealed a millenary deal. The student of Leeds University, are still trying to fput on it a foreign gene… A little trip on the field would have the best effect on them because the solution of their problem already exists.

It is a bit like inventing the thread to cut the butter. A shame to spend tax money on this. The response of the Soil Association, the British Environmental association, on the BBC was a bit similar to this.

But the British government has annonced last July 19 that it will send a 100 million pounds aid to Africa, in GMO seeds just after Bono’s big RED campaign to save Africa from poverty and Aids… In France, what are doing our ecologist ? To cite one very exposed by the media : to compensate our carbone Yann Arthus Bertran’s Foundation Action Carbone is panting 200 hectares of eucalyptus in Chili on Mapuche land, while he condemns in his film HOME the destructive effect of eucalyptus plantations. Further in his site he tells how he is learning to farmers in India how to till the ground and dig in it the remaining ashes from their cooking; the best way to diminish India’s staple crops and create famine.

Remember : the soil is alive, it is a living being. To much ash dug in the soil will transform itself into fossile carbon, uneatable by the bacterias which are the living beings of the soil. Little by little the excess of carbon will kill them and the soil will be unable to perform the exchanges of water and nutrients. It will become a desert little by little. The first sign of this transformation is the appearance of the tansy, tanacetum vulgare, which is the plant indicating the excesses of fossile carbon and the evolution of soil in that case, is towards a desert. I particularly say this to my Indian friends who are still used to, as in many other places in the world, burn their field before working on them. 10 000 years ago this is what the aborigenes in Australia have started to do. At this time the center of Australia was a lake. Today it is a desert.

So finally it is a good thing that Copenhaguen did not succeed, because we are not ready foe it.
Just give an eye to the last Agricultural Fair in Kabul this year, amazing no?

The lack of money in Africa will provoque more thinking before acting. With less money, perhaps one wil turn more on botanic, plant sociology, cell microbiology, micology… all these sciences which are openning our eyes to nature and are helping us to understand how we can get better chances to feed the planet. So better wait for Copenhaguen 2015?

But in the meantime we need to act and multiply the good results to prove the interests of these research : the next projects of the SOS SOiL team are in Marocco and Ethiopia. It has been question of forming the peasants at the boarder of Afghanistan and Pakistan… but for reasons of security will better pursue this task on internet.

Perhaps if Copenhaguen would have passed, sufficient credits would have been allocated to plant GM crops also there, thereby stopping all our effort to develop intensive crops with a better understanding of nature’s richness. Like UK’s foreign office who offered 100million pounds to test GMO crops in Africa which are forbidden in Europe.

While the French foundation to compensate carbon is teaching the world how to behave to avoid high carbon emissions in the atmosphere, with lots of communication and financial partners… A drama is taking place just under our eyes south of France… In Camargue the rice fields are being tilled and sunk under water, which is provoking the equivalent of a traffic jam under the Paris Arch of Triomphe for every acre… In Camargue we are talking of millions of acres which are releasing green house gazes which are participating in the global warming.

It seems here, like people are walking on their heads. Scientists tell Camargue is a place which will disappear under the sea level in 30 years… and they do everything to accelerate the process…

Organic or not they till the soil and sunk it under water … hopefully labour is costly here otherwise they would do like in Asia repiking the plantlets of rice… All this when the famous Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka has been saying for forty years that you don’t need to do this to cultivate rice. One can raise the crops of rice efficiently by cultivating the natural way. Please read his book « the one-straw revolution ».

The natural agriculture when it comes to rice consist in : sowing rice associated with grains of a leguminous plant (clover for example) in a field of high grass ; then cut the grass ten days later while spreading the grass cut on the field to create a mulch on the surface. Then ten days before harvesting sow the next crop also associated with a leguminous seed (barley together with alpha alpha or any other) ; never let the soil nude, always enrich by itself at each crop. Instead of leaving your field nude in winter you get another crop.
According to Fukuoka, the techniques of sinking the rice field under water and repicking rice has been created by the Japanese Shoguns to avoid peasants rebellions while putting them at hard work.

One question as important : where have disappeared all the carcasses and the animal flours of the mad cow scandal ?

In Camargue again… something even more perverse has been invented for the rice culture : since March, thousands of big 500kg bags are sitting along the rice fields waiting to be spread on hundred thousands acres of rice fields : organic fertilizer they call it according to a decree 2092/91 modified (interior law from the French ministry of agriculture)…  Here is what is becoming of the carcasses at the origin of the BSE problem ( Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis) better known as mad cow disease … These animal flours are now used to feed the rice, organic or not…

It was yet amazing to have organic rice cultivated with the water of the Rhone river at the same time when the river was forbidden to any fishing and swimming because of the excess of pathogenic PCBs for human beings.
So now you have the rice fed with animal flours, which is also labelled organic. Who knows if these animals have had any antibiotic or any compulsory anti parasite injection ? Still organic ?

Prions, are ultra resistant cells, pointed out as a cause of the mad cow scandal, are they really destroyed by the process used to make the fertilizer ?
Nothing seems really sure as they add the caption « do not let animal pasture the field 21 days after spraying » … don’t you remember about animals eating animal flours ?

Here in Camargue these huge sacs are everywhere, along the fields, near the houses, in the mid of the « Mas » the local farms… and it smells of cadaver… dogs and foxes have broken some sacs and ate a bit of the mixture… they don’t do it twice. Our little fox terrier almost died the other day after tasting it.

But the worst is not that this fertilizer is used in rice culture ; it is also very popular among a majority of organic vegetable producers… just imagine, it is labelled organic fertilizers.

But let us come back to reason. Once more we are spreading NPK fertilizer without knowing if the soil needs it. We are cultivating without before understanding the dynamic of the soil. We use standard recipes systematically without trying to know what nature is already purveying to help the farmer. Maybe one day somebody will listen to the old Japanese Wiseman who is having record crop after record crop while using the natural way, while here we are experiencing a decline of production year after year. Maybe it is time to think instead of repeating the same process everywhere. Save our soil for the future generation.

Oh, just one more action for the planet : the products for the fields here in Camargue are also sprayed by helicopter… the big mosquito of the Camargue which sprays the fields surrounding the houses, with a big cloud of toxic product.
In one house you hardly hear through the open window a baby crying …  I dont know if this helicopter is carbon compensated but I’d rather let you appreciate its’ agility. The pilot is probably one of the best in France, or at least the one who cumulates the more flying hours.

The French carbon compensation business ignores crisis…

This year they have doubled their price : 20 euros, the ticket to compensate your ton of carbon will cost you now double. Fair enough. While doing so their budget has raised by 270% ; it is now 1,8M Euro.

What do they do with such a budget ? According to their yearly budget just released, they start biomass project in developing countries, recycling agriculture waste and compost with worms … fantastic, it looks like they are in the good path, they have learned from their previous projects.

But sadly on the other hand, they continue to praise their collaboration with the French Forestry institution ONF international, to plant eucalyptus in Chile on the land of the Mapuche Indians… a project which will lead to the desertification of the soil which will be sterilized by the essential oil of the eucalyptus, forbidding all cultures to cast famine in the end.

As a reminder, eucalyptus is a tree native from the arid steppes of Australia which will tend to recreate its’ original biotope everywhere it grows : it sucks 700l a day and sprays its’ essential oil with its’ bark land leaves to sterilize all surrounding soil to avoid the growth of any plants. A monoculture of eucalyptus is fatal to neighbouring cultures and in association with pyrofile resinous like Aleppo pine trees, it becomes criminal. Remember the spectacular fires of Galicia not so long ago …

Back to our French institution which compensates carbon. In India they take action this year with Geoecoly Energy Organisation :
They distribute pyrolise oven to 5000 families in Andra Pradesh : these oven work with the methane of wood and agriculture waste. A great thing to save carbon emissions.
But then they dig in the residues of carbon… taking as example the terra preta do Brasil they hope to multiply by 8 the agricultural production… How can one compare a soil which has been made by millions of years of deep forest to simple soil in which you dig in carbon ?

One must never dig carbon into a soil : it kills all the oxygenated bacteria by asphyxia, thereby hindering the crops which in India can quickly cast hunger. This is probably what the person they are sending there from France during one year will see.

The solution to avoid all this ? Simply by composting this carbon and once done spraying it on top of the soil in case the soil needs it. How to know if the soil really needs it ? By observing the bio indicator plants.

In fact they only need to make a technology transfer from their project of lombricompost, composting with worms, which they just have initiated in North India… Not very complicated indeed, but maybe they are not aware of what they are doing …

Hopefully their action is still very limited ; in fact, acre wise, we are talking of some 100 acres in Chile… In India 5000 families can live on 500 acres, it is not mentioned in their report… In Colombia they have to buy the land before giving it back to their former Indian owners 300 acres this year.

Hopefully their operating costs are high, their verification and checking costs have raised above previsions ; as they send people, trainees and agriculture engineers around the world, in India, Colombia, Peru, Madagascar to double check … All this to allow French big corporations (I give you this link as it supplies a very usefull devise to calculate your own carbon footprint) to compensate all the carbon emissions of their head office which is very good.

But let be serious for a while ; les foodingues in Northern Argentina are transforming a traditional agricultural site of 100 000 acres in natural agriculture : no tilling, no chemicals, so almost zero carbon emissions ; while at the same time transforming it into sylvo agriculture, which is to say planting millions of trees in rows on all the agricultural site to fertilize, create buffer climate zone to attract rain and fight against erosion. All the trees are native and they are planted in a permaculture way with lianas of local medicinal plants in order to increase the crops, as well as the carbon clusters.

It is urgent to do something about saving the soils :
To act on the ground and make soil diagnosis in order to bring adapted solutions to each place, culture, agriculture and pollution.

It is important to communicate on how the soil works. The soil is alive… We human beings are more than 7 billion and still 80% of the life is under the ground. These beings are far more older then us. They have been organised for some million years before us and will survive us the same.

One must understand how the soil works before doing anything with it and risking to destroy it.

More and more when you speak with a farmer today, he tells you that after all these years cultivating, th only thing he doesn’t really know about is how his soil works… its composition he knows of it with analysis made with labs, but its’ dynamic? Its bacterian life, its Fungi… Nothing of all this.

Farmers in Europe are realizing this more often every day, it brings Big Hope.

A foundation created to compensate the carbon emissions with actions for the environment all around the planet…

Its’ first action: financing a plantation of eucalyptus in Chile to help the Mapuche Indians… Lets remember first, that eucalyptus is a tree from the Australian desertic steppe, which dreams to recreate the condition of its primary biome. To do so, it drinks 1400pints water a day, which he evaporates quickly and sprays its antibacterian essential oils by spreading bits of bark and leaves all around. Nothing grows under the eucalyptus it is well known by everybody. Neither can the vegetables of the Mapuche Indians …

Its’ last initiative in India: to distribute light Pyrolyse ovens to cook with the methane of the wood and produce light carbon as side product. And here start the desaster again. He teaches the farmers to turn over the soil and dig the carbon into it … convinced that it can play the role of a sponge as a reserve of extra water!

In fact this is what happens: first by encouraging the Indians to array it provoques carbon and methane emissions in the atmosphere by decomposing the anaerobiotic bacterial world which is suddenly at the surface…

The mycelial and bacterial world has been destroyed by the work of the farmer. It cannot play anymore its role of transforming the carbon into digestable organic matter for agriculture. It becomes then fossile carbon which is bound to asphyxiate all life at the surface of the soil, a bit like too much carbon in the atmosphere if you like. It empeaches the water to penetrate in the ground and provokes erosion.

One must never dig carbon into the ground, it kills its dynamic. Soil is not sewage.

To justify that digging carbon into the ground keeps water into the ground, is to aknoledge a profound mis-knowledge of the ground and of the way it works:
The soil is made of aerobian bacterias on the surface and anaerobian bacteria under. They exchange water, minerals and metals, which is how water can penetrate into the ground deep under. This is also the way bacteria are feeding the plants.

The porous carbon if becoming a sponge will forbid this process and provoque excess of water, hydromorphisms which can hinder the growth of plants like wheat for example.

This is how one can bring a green revolution to rot with the best intentions of the world and provoke famine in a short time.

In India, according to the journalist Palagummi Sainaith, a farmer commits sucide every 30 minutes, because he does not produce enough for his family and cannot assume his credit taken to finance a “modern” agriculture that we are pushing him to get into, while using all his own gods as advertisement.

Please stop this programme which can create a famine shortly, which India does not need.

Solutions are many to get rid of carbon.

One solution to repair this catastrophy would be first to stop turning over the soil. Sow directly in the herbs or ten days before harvesting the previous crop.
Sow a mix of leguminous and graminees and inoculate them with fungis endomycorrhizal (Glomus sp. ), ectomycorrhizal (Rhizopogon sp.) and Trichoderma sp. Cut the herbs or throw the stems…
You can add carbon if you want… but maximum half a teaspoon per acre… if not not you will harvest less.

The spores by setting a mycorrhizal net will feed on carbon and transform it in sugar to bring it directly to the plants… if you have too much carbon you wont favour the correct mix of fungi which can boost your crops.

One advise to get rid of the carbon while creating life : inspire yourself from nature!

Get rid of the carbon by creating revenues in cultivating morels ! They will eat carbon to produce wonderfull and expensive mushrooms, which will bring more money than by destroying the soil!

Another solution would be to frow you carbon in the irrigation damp and inoculate it with microalgaes or cyaniobacterias and produce diesel! So the Indians will be able to thank you and even finance your next projects …