In the forest is the future of the fields, perhaps this is how the essence of the BRF technique should be summarized. The technique? Yeah. For the proponents of the BRF, it goes much further than being an agricultural technique: it is the new paradigm of the carpentry.

On June 17th and 18th, the conference on the development of the BRF in Toulouse, Occitanie – Developper les BRF – was attended by peasants, university professors, crop experts and administrative officials, who witnessed the impact that the new system has achieved in France for at least a few years.

The criticism against industrial cultivation based on machinery, monocultures and drugs plus chemical fertilizers is ancestral. In front of it, both the farmers who have their livelihood in the field and the amateurs who want to cultivate the garden in a clean and organic way have worked on different alternatives: the use of compost as fertilizer, phytotherapy and natural remedies instead of drugs, horticulture without plowing, biodynamic, natural agriculture...

The BRF represents a major change of approach for all. Instead of spreading fertilizers on the ground, he wants to rebuild the forest soil in the fields using crushed branch wood. In what way? Basically, chop the thin branches of leafy trees into small pieces, spreading them over a layer of about five centimeters in the ground, mixing them lightly with the crust and allowing the fungi to work.

This technique aims to cause fungi –which refer to basidiomycetes– to work and initiate a process of humification like in the jungle in the field, instead of the mineralization that is obtained with compost and other fertilizers, which include bacteria. To do this, in the autumn the branches of the trees that are thinner than 7 centimeters of the area are crushed in small pieces of 2-3 centimeters and mixed into the soil.

Living branches of trees and fences have many components, but they attach great importance to lignin for soil renewal. As the lignin, a source of energy but unusable, begins to disintegrate, the mushrooms of the jungle will proliferate and begin to work, giving a new body to the land depleted by agriculture.

BRF advocates find it all profitable. It is said to bring the PH of the soil from acid to neutral. The fields transformed by crushed adaxka with much less water than the others seem to give a much better bano harvest, giving more juicy and tasty fruits and vegetables. Revive the weakened trees. Relieve the farmer of his work.
It is said that areas impoverished by clumsy slaughter and left uninhabitable by desertification can be reproduced by mixing crushed adaxka in them. It is true that BRF experiences have been carried out in some countries of the Sahel, with very good results.

No plants, feed the soil

The French Jean Pain, who had experimented with forest adaxka and shredded weeds in the 1970s, still works with his system. But the giant’s step in this matter was taken by Quebec professor Gilles Lemieux, on the other side of the sea.

At the time, Quebec in Canada was in a deep crisis; the government was looking for new activities and products for the country. Edgar Guay, a senior in the Ministry of Agriculture, is said to have been one of the leftovers in the forestry industry there – thousands of tons of branches that didn’t know where to put them – who began to experiment with how to use them in the carpentry industry.

In the early 1980s, Guay encouraged Gilles Lemieux to organize a research group. Although Lemieux, a doctor in jungle science at Laval University, began reluctantly, he would later be up to his death instead of on this subject. The University of Laval has posted on the Internet a large number of articles by Lemieux, most of them translated in French but also in Spanish.

Heated with the results of Quebec, Lemieux’s team conducted tests in many other countries, including Ukraine, Bolikosta, Senegal and others. And they confirmed that crushed branches perform an even better job in the tropics than in temperate countries, where the ground under the feet of the jungles is much weaker.

In Europe, the BRF began to be mentioned about 15 years ago and in recent times there has been a proliferation of websites, conferences and books on the subject. We have compiled the links of the most interesting ones in the Internet version of this paper. Gilles Lemieux died in April 2009. The World Bank and other major institutions failed to take the research seriously, but it received recognition and appreciation from pioneering growers around the world.

Those who want to know more about this new agricultural paradigm under the protection of the parasol of the beach as under the shadow of the ash of the vortex this summer, would be good to read this from the articles of Lemieux: The hidden world that feeds us: the living soil, freely available in PDF on the site of the University of Laval.

This role brings together one of Lemieux’s clearest speeches with his famous 16 hypotheses. Lemieux says that for millions of years life on land has multiplied in the soil of the jungles and agriculture grew on these basolurs. Today's fields are just old ruined basolurs. The purpose is to grind the first degraded using comminuted wood – the bertsolari could say “cure the degraded” – so that it can function sustainably without further fertilizer or external support.

But in the BRF, foliage is used, because the agriculture itself originated in the forests of foliage. The oldest forests in the world are the most coniferous, but in these the diversity is very small. On the other hand, the broad foliage uses a very different logic, with the greatest diversity accumulating in their forests. For this reason, there should be a maximum of 20% of pine nuts in crushed agricultural crops.
The BRF paradigm has consequences that go far beyond soil fertility. To begin with, the buds of cities and roadsides are not seen with the same eyes, because in the new scheme there is a lot of wealth in them.

In cultivation, the relationship between the field and the forest can vary. Trees are no longer enemies of crops. We could think of changing the barriers that have been lost with the concentration of the camps. In the new paradigm we do not feed the plant, we have to feed the soil. In the midst of bacteria and minerals the simple fungus reigns.

We will also have to rewrite the myths created by the Neolithic. The jungle is no more hostile to us than our mother.

For more information:

• BRFaz extensive bibliography in French, Spanish and English
• One of Gilles Lemieux’s classic articles in Spanish: The hidden world that feeds us: the living soil
• In Spanish Las Maderas Rameales Fragmentadas by expert Daniel Henry
• Belgian Aggra.org, one of the classic BRF sites
• The story of Jean Pain, another pioneer of this system
• Jacky Dupety Complex, La Ferme du Pouzat
• One of Jacky Dupety’s talks on YouTube in six episodes
• Another book about this system: De l’arbre au sol (From tree to earth)