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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Tree-based agriculture on Mediterranean terraces: continuing the story by renewing practices

Résumé

Terraced agriculture in the Mediterranean basin is ancient and justified by an often mountainous relief combined with violent rainfall episodes often occurring at the end of the summer, when the vegetation cover is at its minimum. Thus, the terraces make it possible to have flat land in the mountains, to fight against erosion, to better manage water resources, and to maintain a local agriculture in isolated areas. For a long time, these terraces were home to a polyculture combining vegetables, cereals and fruits (olives, figs, citrus fruits, nuts, pome fruits, stone fruits, grapes) within the framework of a self-sufficient mountain economy that collapsed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the terraces have been massively degraded due to lack of maintenance at a time when, paradoxically, the Mediterranean world would need it the most. Indeed, the aggravation of extreme phenomena linked to climate change as well as the awareness of relocating agricultural production pleads for the revitalization of these cultivation practices on terraces while revisiting them.Within the framework of a collective project on 7 ha of farmland in the southern Cévennes (France), we have dedicated a 50-acre plot (300 m altitude, 10 terraces 5 to 10 m wide with southern exposure; a very varied hydric situation; difficult to mechanize), to a research-action aiming to create an orchard of nuts (almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, pecans) comprising, in the long term, about 100 trees, of which the first 24 were planted in January 2022 Two years were necessary to clear these terraces, which had been abandoned for more than 60 years (ash, oak, maple), to remove the soil, to restructure the soil through preparatory work with animal traction and the cultivation of green manure, and to summarily consolidate the dry stone walls in a very degraded state. With a will to search for synergies in the interactions between trees and crops, this research-action aims (i) to experiment with different varieties of each species of fruit trees, different spatialization of the trees on the terraces, different crops under the trees (aromatic plants, dye plants, cereals, buckwheat, vine), some terraces to be bordered by melliferous hedges in the autumn of 2022, on the fringe of the most degraded walls, (ii) to question the relevance of reconstructing the walls of the terraces identically (iii) to question the notions of autarky and autonomy, as the autarkic agriculture of the 19th century could partially inspire the new peasant approaches aiming at food autonomy in small territories via proximity exchanges (iv) to produce for a collective of 10 people and for local exchanges with other collectives.
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Dates et versions

hal-03908887 , version 1 (06-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03908887 , version 1

Citer

Anna Dupleix, Rémy Marchal, Leana Coutant, Fabien Liagre, Daniele Ori. Tree-based agriculture on Mediterranean terraces: continuing the story by renewing practices. 6th European Agroforestry Conference, EURAF 2022, May 2022, Nuoro, Italy. ⟨hal-03908887⟩

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