Summer is finally here, I am so glad. When I used to spend most of my days indoors, I never realized how long it takes for warmth to come. I feel like I have been freezing my butt most of the time since February. The humid weather of France might not help.
Summer! Warmth, vegetables, swimming in lakes! What a precious season.
Yes, vegetables are finally coming. They come a little late here, with the altitude (there is about 20-30 cm of snow in January and February). For the past two weeks we could have mostly salad, young potatoes, and some green onions, and we complemented the menu with chenopods, a delicious weed which likes to grow on rich soil and tastes like a buttery spinach. But now comes broccoli, garlic, Swiss chard, radishes! Also here these days are the berries; strawberries, raspberries, myrtilles and cassis. The cherries in the area were all a failure, there was too much rain, so they burst and rotted and they had little taste.
Richard started to give out the AMAP baskets this week. We have been weeding, planting all sorts of cabbage, potatoes, seeding more carrots, putting out irrigation tubes, preparing chestnut marmalade pots...
**
Today, small tragedy at the farm: a visitor's dog opened the rabbit cage, and killed one of the two rabbits. So I guess, we will eat rabbit soon. But I am not sorry for the rabbit. I prefer to know him dead than leading this stupid life in this stupid cage. Ah, why can't we all get our meat from hunting once again!
**
I am reading books about the history of Ardèche. I learn a lot of interesting things, but one point comes across straight and clear for me: it's been a while that farmers have been subjected to the absurdities of the “market”, this didn't come with the modern loans and big machines. Many farmers of the Ardèche, until the beginning of the century, were malnourished because they couldn't afford to eat the food items that they sold. For example, cheese, butter, wine, were reserved for the purpose of making money. For most artisans the situation was the same. The shoemaker, to remain competitive, would sell his shoes for a ridiculous price, such that the worker in the cordonnerie earned in one day enough to buy six eggs, and would have needed 96 days of work in order to buy the shoes that he made (from “Ardèche”, by Michel Carlat). It is still quite mysterious for me how our societies ended up in such a situation. For some people, it's all clear. Capitalism is the source of it all. But I am not sure, I have the feeling that the real source is something else.
But this dependency on “selling” starts to explain the absurdities that I see in farming. Yes, there seem to be many things that farmers do, which seem to me irrational from the effort/gain ratio point of view. Let's take cheese for example. It's one thing to take some milk from a nursing mother, and to share the rest with the baby. But that's not what dairy farmers do. If they did that, they would not get enough to sell it, so they kill the calf (or lamb, or kid), and take all the milk for themselves (vegetarians, think about this...). But milking the mothers and making cheese is a lot of work. Or perhaps more accurately, it's an enslaving work, because then, when there is no baby to replace you, you absolutely need to milk the mother twice a day, otherwise it will become sick.
But, if you did not kill the baby, what would happen? You would not need to milk the mother every day and twice a day, but rather you would be able to leave everyone happy in the pasture, and just move them to another pasture once in a while. Then the energy, instead of going into the milk, would go into the baby. When it is grown, you could kill it, and eat it, and you would get from it the same energy as that that you would have got from the milk. (At least, that's how I see it.)
One of Richard's friends is a cow cheese maker. He does this alone. Before, he used to do everything: keeping the cows, milking them, and making the cheese. But eventually he realized that it was too much work for one person, so he gave up milking the cows, and instead he raises them for meat. And he still makes cheese, but... from bought milk... Yesterday, I heard from another man a similar story, with goats. But in his case, since not so many people want to eat goat I guess, he had to give up his business.
So I do not understand at all, why did people start making dairy products as a business, instead of meat? Is it because the market was filled with meat already? That doesn't sound right. I just cannot comprehend the phenomenon.
As of vegetables, it seems also that many things are grown more to satisfy the client than because it is reasonable. For exemple, the tomatoes and peppers. It is impossible to grow them without a green house even in most parts of France. Greenhouses are expensive and necessitate quite an investment. But people want to eat tomatoes and peppers, no matter what the climate is.
You should see the fields of green houses and their lovely plastic roofs which cover most of the land of Perigord, for the purpose of growing strawberries. I don't know if, without the greenhouses, the production would not be possible, or simply reduced. But anyhow, do we really so badly need to eat that many strawberries, that we need to completely disfigure Perigord with greenhouses? Not to mention that these strawberries are generally grown either on plastic covered soil, or in hydroponics, so that anyhow you can wonder about their nutritional value, even for the Bio products. Yes, I don't know if hydroponic can be bio, but at least the Bio Label is not at all concerned with plastic. I have seen the soil in a Bio garderner's field being completely filled with pieces of plastic, because he fails to get rid of it all before tilling the soil. This was a very sad seeing.
And I guess, we cannot blame the clients for wanting to buy things that they like. The problem is that the client is completely disconnected from the producers' issues, so basically there is no collaboration between the producer and the client. Some think that the basket delivery system should solve this, like Richard. But I have doubts. I don't have the impression that Richard is really free to do what's reasonable, because he still needs to please his clients, as he still is in competition with the other basket providers.
**
Talking of plastic, you cannot believe how much plastic goes into gardening, I guess this must be true for the rich countries. There are plastic films to cover the soil to prevent weeds, there are plastic irrigation tubes, there are plastic pots to start the seeds, there is plastic covering for the green house. Oh please, someone, invent a plastic which I would not mind to eat!!
**
But I have hope! I think that the massive movement of populations to the city leads to the realization by these city people that pollution is not a fun thing. And this realization could not have happened without this population movement, because when surrounded with lots of nature, it's very hard to see anything as “pollution”. For example I have been several times struck by how much the people “living on the land” that I have been meeting and even the most eco-conscious ones, do not have one tiny bit of the repulsion towards cars that I have, and that I believe many other city people have. So I think that it is in the city, where the troubles caused by our irrational behaviors become concentrated and obvious, that we become forced to think again about what we are doing and why. So now we will be able to put our attention back on nature, with a fresh and more enlightened mind!
Yes, today we have pollution and dead soils, but we should not forget how much humanity has been progressing spiritually, nor the freedom that so many of us now have, something unprecedented in history. And I believe that when people are free, they do the right things.
