Transformer plusieurs hectares de terres dévastées et abandonnées en une ferme verdoyante. C’est le défi que se sont lancés John et Molly en Californie. Voici leur histoire.
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00:00Musique douce
00:04Musique douce
00:24When we first got here, the farm looked pretty run down,
00:29although at the time we didn't really even know how bad it was.
00:32There were no cover crops growing under the orchard trees.
00:35It was completely white dirt.
00:37It wasn't even brown dirt or dark.
00:40It was like a white, almost sand.
00:42So we were basically dealing with this rocky, sandy soil that had no life.
00:47We needed to create a farm that would both first reawaken an ecosystem
00:52and then secondly try to integrate the farm into the reawakened ecosystem
00:57without creating collateral damage,
00:59because we were going to use nature to solve the agricultural problems.
01:03Musique douce
01:17Musique douce
01:46First thing we realized is that we had opened Pandora's box.
01:49We had this incredibly dreamy idea of bringing nature back.
01:54Well, nature doesn't necessarily want to cooperate with your agenda.
01:57Nature is just going to do its thing.
01:59Coyotes killed 350 chickens over a couple of years period,
02:02but then we had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of snails
02:07that are non-native to this area that were attacking our citrus trees
02:10because we were growing this really healthy cover crop.
02:13And they love cover crops as well as gophers love cover crops.
02:17And so we had this massive epidemic of gopher explosion.
02:20The gophers eat the roots of the citrus trees and other trees,
02:24but they also, then we've got above the ground,
02:26we've got these snails destroying the leaves of the citrus trees,
02:29prohibiting their ability to photosynthesize and grow fruit.
02:33And so we had to figure out how to mitigate all these things
02:36and what in nature existed at our disposal
02:40or could we bring back into the farm to try to find some balance.
02:43It's all about looking deeply into the problems that exist in front of you in nature
02:48and try to understand why they exist.
02:50And then when you start to build up this catalog of all these issues
02:53and all these reasons why these issues occur,
02:56you start to see threads of connections where you can put things together
03:00and create balance.
03:02We realized that if we got rid of all the coyotes,
03:05we would still be left with this massive problem of gophers and rabbits
03:09and we wouldn't have the help of the coyote.
03:12So if we could just figure out a way to discourage the coyote
03:15rather than kill all the coyotes,
03:17then we might have a helper on our hands versus just a pest.
03:21I mean, that's what we're experiencing as a human species right now on our planet
03:26is that we've dominated it to such a degree
03:28that we've destroyed more than 40% of the biodiversity in the last 50 years.
03:33In the last 260 years, we've lost a third of the world's topsoil.
03:36We've deforested 46% of the trees.
03:39We've watched the carbon numbers go from 260 parts per million
03:42to over 400 parts per million.
03:45And what we are destroying is our planet's immune system.
03:49And agriculture plays a significant role in either the regeneration
03:54or the extraction and destruction of our planet's ecosystem slash immune system.
04:03Translation & subtitling by Quentin Dewaghe Traduction & sous-titrage par Quentin Dewaghe q.dewaghe.com
04:33Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada