“How to talk about a crake (small migratory wading bird) ? » This strange question was recently asked to me by two friends. We are in the Drôme, 15 kilometers from Valence, on an agricultural plain dominated by fields of wheat and corn, on the Grand Laval farm.
Here, since 2006, a couple of farmers, Sébastien Blache and Elsa Gärtner, have taken over one of the family farms and transformed a uniform expanse of corn into a landscape of tangled small plots cultivated with cereals, pulses (peas, lentils, beans) and oilseeds (rapeseed, camelina). (or “fake linen”)sunflower), forage meadows (grasses, alfalfa, sainfoin (herbaceous plant)) and extensive orchards (apples, pears, peaches, apricots, plums, figs). Add mobile chicken coops, 120 ewes and their lambs, inter-rows of rhubarb and red fruits, and you have one of the most ambitious mixed crop-livestock systems available.
The dreary plain has become lush and walkers are not mistaken: every day, the small road that crosses the farm is used by the inhabitants of the hamlets and the neighboring village, Montélier. The work is exciting, but hard. Thus, as summer approached, it extended into the night to press the hay before the rains, the fruits had to be picked urgently, the sunflowers replanted, because the first ones had not taken: in this profession, the unexpected is a constant.
The great diversity of productions complicates the work but constitutes the life insurance of the system: if a workshop fails one year, as during the early frosts of the apricot trees or the summer droughts that killed the chickpeas and beans in 2023, other productions ensure the economic sustainability of the farm. Here, no chemical products are added, except against peach leaf curl (disease caused by a fungus)organic. No external inputs: the manure comes from sheep and chickens, the legumes enrich the soil with nitrogen. The chickens are fed with food produced on the farm.
Making room for the wild
While the intensification of agricultural practices still underway has led to a rapid erosion of biodiversity, this type of system produces the opposite effect. Elsa Gärtner and Sébastien Blache observed this day after day, and from discussions to discussions, in particular with the philosopher Baptiste Morizot, the idea came to create the association Réensauvager la ferme to set up scientific monitoring of the wildlife on this farm, which I now coordinate.