APPROACHES AND METHODS
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF VEGETABLE FARMING
To grow our vegetables, our approach is based on living soil farming techniques. The main purpose of these techniques is to stimulate the soil's natural fertility by implementing a fundamental principle: soil plant cover.
Living soil farming techniques aim to eliminate mechanical tillage so as not to disrupt the activity of earthworms and other soil dwellers, including fungi and bacteria. This means that there's no room for plows, cultivators or other tillage equipment on our farmland. Instead, to sustain life in the soil, we place plant cover and the return of organic matter at the heart of the production system: cover crops, compost, mulch, green waste, etc.
The key role of plant cover is to produce and add organic matter to the soil in order to store humus, mobilize and limit the leaching of mineral elements, limit soil erosion, compete with weeds and prevent them from germinating, absorb and retain runoff, and ensure good soil structure.
All these techniques help to protect the biodiversity that contributes to soil fertility, and to produce quality vegetables while preserving natural resources.
THE SOIL
Ever since life first appeared on Earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, nature has been based on a three-stage cycle of production, consumption and recycling. This sustainable development model, in which the waste of some becomes the resources of others, relies on the soil, the living medium for plant production.
At the interface between the atmosphere and the bedrock, agricultural soil is just a thin layer of topsoil that has long been regarded as a simple, inert growing medium. It is now time to appreciate its true value in terms of the services it provides to society and to farmers. A major pool of biodiversity, it is believed to host half of the planet's living organisms. It is also a powerful carbon sink, helping to fight climate change thanks to plant roots storing the organic matter produced by photosynthesis. As the farmer's main means of production, it is in their best interest to care for the soil's fertility in order to ensure sustainable production.
This is the approach we advocate at the Breizh Café Farm, where we seek to protect our soils and enrich their natural fertility so that life can flourish and develop. Our production techniques are geared towards farming on living soil — plant cover, agroforestry and the return of organic matter to the soil are just some of the levers we use to achieve our goal: a living, fertile soil.
AGROFORESTRY
Like all plants, trees photosynthesize and absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, fixing carbon in their tissues, but also in the soil. This effect is amplified by their large size and long lifespan, which is why trees play such an important role in ecosystems. Their natural ability to capture and convert carbon, in the form of organic matter (which contains almost 50% carbon), is unrivalled. This is because all trees can store carbon in their constituent material: biomass. They suck up carbon in large quantities to support their growth, and they store it permanently in their wood, leaves and roots... Humus, the top layer of soil formed by the dead biomass of trees and other vegetation, will turn into organic matter thanks to the work of soil decomposers.
Agroforestry is about putting trees back at the heart of farming systems. It spans a wide range of practices and crop-tree associations. Combining orchards with meadows or orchards with vegetable crops is an agroforestry practice which has, historically, made it possible to group several types of crops. More broadly, bocage, hedgerows and all manners of integrating trees into the agricultural landscape are forms of agroforestry. Agroforestry provides many benefits to farmers and is recognized as a lever for the development of agroecology: crop diversification, habitats for biodiversity, microclimates and carbon storage.
37 Acres
25 acres of buckwheat
2000 sq.m. vegetable plots
2017 ouverture de la ferme
3000 trees
30 vegetable varieties
60 apple variety
1000 apple trees
THE FARM IN NUMBERS
The Breizh Café Farm is a project that brings together our Breizh Café values and reinforces our desire to promote the influence of farming and the richness of the Breton terroir.