Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World by Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer. 

3/5 rating. 226 pages

Book #27 of 2019. Read July 16, 2023.

This book tells all about this couple’s forays into permaculture-backed agriculture on a small scale.

The subtitle of this book sums up their ideas: One-Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World. I really like the first three-quarters of this book as I am hugely interested in the ideas of a small microfarm that is based on principles of working with nature. The move towards ever larger farms has NOT been good for nearly anyone and has led to much less efficiency in many domains:

“In the United States in 2002, the revenue per unit area for farms less than 1 hectare (2.5 acres) was ten to fifty times higher than the largest American farms.”

Their mix of vegetable gardening, along with a forest garden, and fruit trees is a great idea! I also wrote down some ideas that they tried out such as heating their plants in winter with compost.

This book has an incredible goal to get millions of microfarms into the world. These are farms somewhere around 2-5 acres (~ 2-4 football fields in size) worth of varied agriculture use. Basing their info off their farm at Bec, they dream of the below scenario:

• “If a cultivated area of about 1,000 square meters (0.25 acre), as in La Ferm du Bec Hellouin, produces, throughout the year, the equivalent of sixty to eighty CSA baskets of fruits and vegetables weekly, then any garden, even a small courtyard, becomes a potential farm. A 200-square-meter lawn, with good soil and a skilled gardener, could be producing a dozen weekly baskets. A 10-square-meter balcony, almost a basket. Flat roofs represent so many opportunities.”
• “Going with the flow of life, trying to understand what is good for the soil, good for vegetables, good for people and for the whole world of the living, is the foundation of natural farming.”

I liked the ideas I got from this book, and possibly even more, the amount of other resources, including their website www.fermedubec.com. I think this is a really interesting, almost philosophical book about what the future of farming (and therefore the world) could look like!

Quotes:

“Feeding ourselves is an act as intimate as lovemaking.”

“Food, like sex, should be a matter of love.”

“Do they know that the ancient Persian pairidaeza, the root of paradise, means ‘garden’?”

“Just grow one small area, and do it well. Then, once you have it right, grow more!”

“Weeds are generally wild plants that tend to thrive on degraded soils. Recall that, in nature, soil is never naked unless some sort of mishap has made it so. These wild, pioneer plants therefore play an important role: They are able to grow on very poor soil, withstand drought and heat from the sun, and regenerate soil, which allows it to later accommodate more delicate vegetation, like our crops.”

“But where to find the courage necessary for such a change? How to get out of the current stagnation, this lack of perspective and imagination? Protesting about future famine and environmental disasters is not necessarily the best approach. Perhaps it is better to offer solutions that generate enthusiasm, alternatives that make people want to make changes.”

“It is estimated that there are thirty-five to seventy thousand edible plants; seven thousand have already been consumed by human societies.”

“It turns out that it generally costs less to maintain common vegetable gardens than parks, and greening up cities is one of the most effective ways to reduce vandalism.”

#lafermedubec #farming

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