Good morning!
Do you remember two weeks ago I told you how the industry crushed sustainable practices and squeezed poor farmers and the land until they couldn't give anymore?
It was a pretty harsh newsletter, to be honest, but it ended on a cheerful note, as I promised to tell you in the future how organic and sustainable agriculture can regenerate land and keep families who have been farming for generations afloat.
And with first-hand advice from our farmer friends who have been fighting the system their whole lives, no less😎!
And today is that day, so without further ado... Let's go✊!
One of the most important points I talked about last time was fertilizer.
And for good reason, as it is the food for plants, and like all living things, plants need to eat to live and grow strong💪.
To avoid artificial chemicals, Clara produces her own homemade fertilizer from organic waste.
This is an organic and sustainable practice, but it is also quite slow and laborious, and since she cannot produce it on a large scale, Lola has to use her resources wisely to make the most of what she has available.
To do this, she uses a centuries-old technique that revolutionized European agriculture: Crop rotation♻️.
Since I mostly grow long-lived trees, I don't have this luxury😅, but many farmers grow vegetables that grow directly in the soil, and in less than a year they are already grown!
To see the advantages of this system, imagine a bunch of our organic carrots.
I'm sure you're familiar with this root.
You can eat it raw or cooked, but what you've probably never thought of eating is the green stem from which we're holding them, right?
However, if you give this stem to a cow or a rabbit, they can make use of it, as different species can use different types of food.
It's the same with plants; different families can use different types of nutrients in the fertilizer.
So, by rotating crop families intelligently and systematically, you can make the most of the fertilizer.
At the same time, you avoid saturating the soil with unused nutrients.
This might sound like a bad thing, but in life, everything in excess is bad, and these excesses can end up affecting the microfauna that maintains balance in the field, which can have catastrophic consequences…
For example, one of the consequences of monoculture is the proliferation of pests, which, when encountering weakened local fauna, wipe out entire crops.
To make matters worse, chemical pesticides are used to eliminate these pests, affecting the quality of the fruit, creating an endless vicious cycle😵💫.
Vicent, whom you probably know for his organic potatoes, knows this well.
That's why he ensures his land is always healthy by changing crop families with each harvest.
In summary, this method makes the most of natural resources in a sustainable and waste-free way, and by taking care of nature, it returns the favor, giving us natural, healthy, and incomparably high-quality fruit🥰.
That's all for this Thursday...
See you next week!
