Over the past five years, we have introduced into our gardens a product called biochar, a vegetable carbon, whose main function is to sustain life.
Industrial agriculture uses numerous products whose name ends in “cide”, such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and miticides. The suffix “cide” comes from the Latin “cida”, which means to kill. So all chemical agricultural practices are aimed at killing living organisms in the soil. In organic agriculture, we work in the opposite way. The prefix “bio” comes from Greek, and it means life. So, in organic agriculture, we have understood that, to produce healthy and resilient plants, and healthy cultures and animals—this goes for both plants and animals—we must promote life. Our research project consists in developing techniques and measures to characterize soil life. We are working in partnership. We are two companies participating in this specific project.
The next agricultural revolution will inevitably go through microbiology. We had the era of chemical products and soil physics, but soil microbiology is the next agricultural revolution. We will be able to move away from products ending in “cide” to produce healthful food for human health using the soil.