He apologizes for the conditions in which he receives us. Régis Chevallier, the president of the Maraîchers nantais, is still in shock after the degradations committed this Sunday, and for which he filed a complaint. At the call of the collective Les Uprisings of the Earth, some 150 environmental demonstrators burst into a greenhouse belonging to its federation, in Pont-Saint-Martin south of Nantes, tearing or tagging the tarpaulins and trampling equipment and hundreds lettuce plants. “It is always misunderstanding that dominates, assures the president on Tuesday, in front of the irrigation system torn out and now out of order. Yet it is a tool of which we are proud, which allows us to innovate for the future, to make market gardening take a real turn. »
Since 2016, market gardeners from Nantes, France’s leading producers of lily of the valley, lamb’s lettuce, radishes and cucumbers, have been carrying out all sorts of experiments there, before deploying them, or not, in the 200 farms in the sector. “The objective is in particular to better understand the water needs of crops to further optimize its use,” says Brigitte Pelletier, technical director of the Departmental Center for Market Gardening Development. We also study the life of the soil, with measurements carried out very regularly and the collection of data. »
At the moment, it is a cereal that arouses the hope of the fifteen engineers who work on this 3,600 m2 site, because its cultivation could clean up the soil and limit radish diseases. Above our heads, the “shading screens” obtain satisfaction, rather than whitewashing the greenhouses by helicopter, to limit the radiation of the sun. A little further on, strips of flowers have been planted in an attempt to attract aphid-loving predators, the bane of market gardeners. “Pesticides, water consumption, there is nothing taboo,” says Régis Chevallier, who boasts of his “living soil” technique, capable of limiting fertilizers and watering.
First sowing of lamb’s lettuce without sand
But the opponents, whose action aroused a lively controversy, do not hear it that way. “South of the Loire, a handful of agri-managers specializing in industrial market gardening are in the process of monopolizing land and water, destroying the bocage and its hedges, preventing new installations by blowing up the land prices, to artificialize the soil with a lot of plastic sheeting and heated greenhouses”, writes the collective of the Uprisings of the Earth, which accuses the market gardeners of consuming “30% of the sand” of the decried sandpits.
“We know that the resource is limited, that’s why we are looking for alternatives to this ancestral technique, defends Régis Chevallier. We did the first seedlings of lamb’s lettuce without sand right here! We’ve been working on it for years, but we need time for the techniques to be deployed operationally. »
Nantes market gardeners, who believe that “if there is no more irrigation, there is no more agriculture”, have also recently installed three rainwater reserves on the site, in order to study the evaporation, water quality and in particular the presence of bacteria or pesticides. In the meantime, “we will rebuild, replant the trials, and move forward”, they promise, lamenting the loss of “several years of work”. The assessment of the damage is still in progress, but these would be counted in “tens of thousands of euros”.