Green fertilizers

The green manures are sown just after the wheat, as soon as the geese and chickens have cleared the plot. We sow a big mixture on more than 5 to 9 ha of field beans or peas, oats or forest rye, phacelia, mustard, vetches and clovers. They will remain there until spring, cut by the Landes sheep herd, which will feast on these plants full of nitrogen from the sky that they have trapped in their roots under the soil, thus capturing the carbon from the sky (and the nitrogen) in the soil, in order to trap it. In addition to feeding the soil with free fertilizer for the next crop (free nitrogen from the sky), it is an effective way to decarbonize the atmosphere and thus fight against global warming. You should never plow the soil, otherwise it would release the carbon stored for years in the soil. From year to year the top layer of the soil decompacts, under the work of the roots of green manures but also of the worms and other vital underground lives to practice agro-ecology. Nature being well done, the goslings which are born at the same time (from March to June) love these freshly cut green manures and which allow them to develop healthily. But also the ewes who need to eat it to nurse their newborn babies. Corn will follow, then wheat, then green manures again according to an unchanging seasonal rotation.

The animals, sheep, geese, chickens are fundamental in this system, without them, weeding and complementary fertilization would be impossible. Animals of ancient breeds are fundamental to practice this type of agro-ecological agriculture, without chemicals and in a natural way.