Les Foodingues

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.