3. Working the soil.
To work the soil, it’s the ploughshare that opens the furrow, the point of the implement hauled by man or animal. Man engraves the soil, after which he will sow in the furrow, trusting the seed to the female being that is the ground. Germination will provide for the future the prospect of food that has been born from the meeting of the Sun and the Earth.
Since the dawn of time, man has known that it was his responsibility to work the soil and that the ground, in return, could show its generosity. To convince oneself of this fact and to realise the importance that our ancestors accorded to agriculture for their subsistence, all you need to do is cast a glance over the scenery shown on Egyptian pottery, Greek vases, ancient engravings or the fresco of the Municipal Palace of Sienna, entitled The aims of good government, which shows a countryside scene from the fourteenth century.
But these vestiges of the past bear witness to a respect and an instinctive comprehension of the ground of which little remains today. At the Greek National Museum in Athens we can admire a bas relief from Eleusis that shows the goddess Demeter with a wheat sheaf in her arms, showering Man with her gifts. According to tradition, harvest was accompanied with tears because one was removing some of the goddess’ powers – how attitudes have changed!
We find again the Earth goddess in the Sumerian astronomic tradition where she is shown in the stars that make up the constellation of the Virgin, where she holds in one hand the wheat sheaf and in the other the bunch of grapes that symbolize, respectively, the flesh and the blood of life.
In all the countries of the world where respect for nature still exists, one can join in with the seed sowing festivals, events that are often misunderstood by our society whose spiritual values have crumbled away in recent decades and which is moving further and further away from rural lore.
There still exist some places in Africa where, before sowing, the labourer uses the horse-drawn-plough to draw in the soil a woman’s sex. After which everyone dances to celebrate the wedding and the man then sows the precious seed, the semen, in the furrows thus formed, hoping that his prayer will be granted and that the goddess Earth will provide a generous harvest to feed the families. What a lesson for the western man who gets involved with such a rite! So satisfied is he with his culture but, as it happens, incapable of understanding the richness of these disappearing traditions – often as a result of his own intervention!
In all the countries of the world, the working of the soil is the very basis of survival. The man who is in charge of an agricultural domain is duty bound to put himself at the service of the soil; the survival and durability of the soil is his responsibility. The field-tasks and other agricultural chores were once entrusted to the work-animals, cows and oxen that would pull the plough slowly but powerfully. From the end of the nineteenth century, little by little the horse replaced cattle in this job, such that its more rapid pace and pulling power allowed a sudden evolution of drawn equipment. By its intelligence and its association with man, this animal has undeniably aided agriculturists in the western world to better feed its people, but without doubt it kick started a more mechanistic line of development.
It’s the horse that pulled the first machines, from the hay and corn cutting bar to the combine harvest via the latter’s forerunner. The horse opened the path to mechanisation and also lent its name to the famous steam horse [i.e. ‘steam engine’, but in French, cheval-vapeur, where cheval = horse, vapeur = steam]. But this poor animal was drowned in mud during the First World War when it was used to drag canons and was replaced by the tractor, a false horse with four wheels.
Nevertheless, when in the Grand Crus of Alsace or on the slopes above Tain-l’Hermitage, I hear once again the quick steps of a horse and its breaths made staccato with the consenting effort required to work these difficult slopes, it gives rise in me to a burst of nostalgia and a sort of serenity, a serenity fed by the noise of the sweet sliding of the plough and the embroiled odours of earth and the sweat of a working animal.
The swing plough that used to open the soil was replaced by its modern descendant. The latter has certain advantages but entails equally some drawbacks, in particular the tractor pan it creates, which cuts in two the active part of the soil as well as leaving a smooth-bottomed furrow as if the latter had been flattened with the back of a trowel. As a result some other tools appeared, in particular in the vineyard. The manufacturers ended up realising that a tractor is not a horse and that its motor could power other tools. First of all some bad tools came along, such as the rotavator [footnote: A turning tool. Not advised on the basis that it breaks down soil structure and creates a tractor pan.] and the rotating harrow, which also led to formidable compaction and moreover which created on the surface some soil configurations that were so disorganised that they take a large part of the blame for catastrophic soil erosion. As a result we turned to non-cultivation and the laboratories attacked the market with their self-proclaimed “miracle” herbicides. A decade or two ago, some tools with less drawbacks appeared among the vines. The plough is certainly used less now but it has been replaced by the scarifiers (with their hooks that are shaped like slices of melon) that eliminate smoothed off surfaces and can considerably improve the structure of soils. Among the new generation of cultivators, it’s currently the roto-labour that seems to give good results, albeit with the severe problem of weighing far too much.
The importance of working the soil
Working the soil has multiple advantages; firstly, the aeration of the living medium that is indispensable for the reproduction of aerobic bacteria; but also for the penetration of other elements into the soil, such as nitrogen, and numerous extremely fine substances such as silica. The aeration of the soil fixes these elements. “One pass with a harrow is worth two soakings with a sprinkler” as the traditional wisdom has it.
Compaction, provoked as much by repeated tractor passes along the inter-row space as by rain, forces out oxygen from the soil. Thus the mechanical action of restructuring shows itself to be indispensable, with all the interior life of the soil having to be reactivated by a mixing.
Above all, working the soil has the effect of mixing together the upper soil layers, which are richer in humus, with the lower levels that are richer in minerals. Cultivation techniques are very effective at deepening the aerobic and humic “A-Horizon” and this without any risk of raising up a lower horizon – so long as this work is carried out using the scarifiers of the “melon slice” type. As far as the vine in particular is concerned, and taking into account the time of year, we can make the roots plunge downwards by denying them access to the surface with successive passes with the scarifier, and this can be done without traumatising the vine.
Finally, the regulation of weeds should be done with implements that totally uproot them, in the knowledge that the tools referred to as hoes or “hearts” lead inextricably to a very undesirable smoothing of the soil, without taking into account the fact that they also cut the weeds at the neck, which only serves to strengthen their re-growth. Their use is only profitable if followed by a scarifage [footnote: an operation that consists in breaking up the hardened crust of the soil.] a short time later.
Individual tillage techniques.
One can include in the class of tillage techniques the autumn heaping-up works [footnote: Soil treatment in which earth is built up over the bases of the vine trunks using a plough equipped with spreaders], but occasionally it’s necessary to undertake later the tricky task of re-distributing this soil from the short spaces between trunks. If this kind of un-heaping work is necessary one will take the precaution of carrying it out in conjunction with a scarifier of the melon slice type in the inter-row space. The un-heaping tools were always a part of the viticulturist’s traditional arsenal of implements; little by little, these have been replaced by hydraulic hoeing blades (which pass under the rows) that nevertheless show themselves to be quite useful when the inter-trunk space has been heaped-up.
Ripping is of interest before plantation. It has undoubtedly supplanted deep-ploughing, which had been used since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the latter wrecked the large part of vineyards by un-earthing the lower horizons of the subsoil, ripping, which does not jumble up the soil layers for as long as it does not go too deep, allows on the other hand to loosen them perfectly, thereby facilitating the bedding-down of new plants.
Finally deep ploughing, because it certainly deserves a mention, is a surgical soil operation. Although it’s a highly traumatic operation, it can, however, turn out to be useful in certain cases such as; the compaction of soil at a deep level; the lack of cohesion between the aerobic and anaerobic media; or shallow rooting that fails to exploit the available terroir. You should be aware that deep ploughing is not justified unless you are absolutely sure that the roots will be able to slide into the opening thus made in order to occupy a deeper zone, which, by leading life downwards, will lead afterwards to the benefit of the soil. To avoid the destruction of the soil it is furthermore advisable to use the following technique: deep plough every other row with a fin-less blade just after the harvest and sow immediately a cereal in the row (such as barley or spring oats – because they have a very short vegetative cycle) that will colonise the soil with a kilometre of roots per seed. It’s also advisable to slash the subsequent growth in March or April when the sap is rising because at this stage there will be no re-growth. Once the air and bacteria have gone deep down into the soil the vine will be able to push in its roots. With the addition of appropriate preparations, one can in this way resuscitate a vine that is in full decline.
The soil work rhythms.
You must of course take into account the season for the working of the soil. It’s in autumn, the centripetal part of the year, when it is advisable to carry this out, because the ground is ripe and allows itself to be open. I was there in the day when tractors were light and not very powerful and we saw very quickly if the machinery was being admitted or not. The increase in power has allowed what one could call a rape of the ground. A bit of respect, please, for this living being!
Other rhythms can be used (we will look at them more closely in chapter 5) such as the lunar cycle, for instance, that one used to refer to “autumn-lunar” and that Maria Thun refers to as a period for planting. This rhythm, which is also centripetal, allows one to make some interesting forces return to the soil.
If there is one rhythm that is simple and effective then that’s surely the daily rhythm. Centrifugal in the morning and centripetal in the afternoon, it has a very clear effect on water regulation. If I hoe in the morning, I’m going to dry out and make the water leave [the soil and/or plants, presumably], and I’m also going to activate the ethereal forces of vegetative reproduction; in the event of a halting of sap-flow, I’ll be stimulating the plant and thus limiting attacks by aphids or mites, which are attracted to the plant to make their contribution to the rising sap. But on the other hand, I risk increasing attacks by fungal diseases. Faced with disease risks, one has to advise afternoon sessions with the hoe because they allow one to safeguard water or to reduce evaporation resulting from changes in capillary action. This centripetal hoeing is highly favoured and has a strongly stabilizing effect.
One can also choose the days that correspond the best with the types of plant that you are growing. Maria Thun (who publishes a calendar of sowing dates every year) has noticed that the choice of the day according to the position of the moon in space can strengthen certain plant poles. While her work is strongly contested by scientists, it is the fruits of 40 years of observation and experience on the ground that are irrefutable for true researchers – and I stipulate ‘true researchers’ and not simply those who condemn without being aware of the results.
We will discuss later on recently discovered rhythms that consist of sequences of approximately a dozen days. These rhythms give some quite extraordinary results for the balance of the plant that we weed. One can associate the favourable days for weeding with the indicated rhythms, for example a hoeing in the morning and then in the evening and once again the following morning or evening, according to the wished for effect. Finally, on certain days, working the soil will make many weeds germinate while on other days it will slow down the germination and allow the maintenance of a clean soil. One uses this method to maximise the energy expenditure linked to each tractor pass.
That said, it’s up to the vine grower, to whom the effects of his work will return, partly as a result of his particular vines and his particular plot, to decide on the most appropriate way of working the soil. He will have to take account of the risks of attacks by insects and sap-sucking mites or plant viruses and fungal attacks. He will also have to combat erosion by the choice of tool, knowing that, on the slopes, the more the soil is broken down, the more the risk of erosion increases because the surface area of clods is reduced. Without forgetting that one must equally take into consideration the vegetative stage of the plants, the state of the soil and the compaction that the excessive weight of the tractor often threatens to induce.
At the same time or after working the soil the vine grower will eventually have to go on to the application of the appropriate biodynamic preparation, something that is always enhanced by tillage.
Agriculture is an art and art does not express itself except through know-how.
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