(AFP) – Peanuts, ginger, sweet potatoes… Out of a desire to innovate, Landes farmers have launched into these atypical productions, better known in tropical or sub-tropical latitudes but which adapt to the local soil with the climate change.
At the beginning of the 19th century, as departmental archives attest, the cultivation of exotic plants such as peanuts or cotton was tested in the Landes, without much success at the time.
In the 1990s in Soustons, the Delest family decided to take up the challenge, with the memory of the grandfather who roasted peanuts in his garden. Planted in May and harvested in the fall, the Valencia variety, from the southern United States, is adapted to the Landes climate and its sandy soils.
Long remaining at two hectares of production, the Darrigade Farm, which also produces asparagus, strawberries, corn and fatted ducks, today produces peanuts on more than 20 hectares, notably supplying a “peanut factory” created with a chocolatier from Dax for local spreads or peanut butter.
“The demand for short circuits is exploding,” notes Mélanie Delest, associated with her brother and cousin on the farm. But the yields are extremely unpredictable: less than one ton per hectare in the worst years, and up to two or three when everything is aligned.” Far from the rates displayed by large American or Brazilian producers.
“There are lots of factors that come into play, the climate, the production period, etc. Here, each year is very different, she emphasizes. Last year was very hot, very good; this year , it’s much more complicated to say that it’s climate change…”
“It would be too simple to think that everyone can grow peanuts here. Over the years, we have greatly improved the technical aspects to successfully develop production,” adds the farmer in front of her peanuts who, at the time of the harvest, must dry naturally on the feet for a few days, before being transported in a trailer on a mesh bottom, heated to bring them back to the right humidity level.
– Grapefruit –
Their ginger harvest, a crop that they launched in 2021, the Fermes Larrère – a family collective of farms in the department, in mixed farming and breeding – will also do it later this year, rather at the end of November than at the end of September, as a result of a less hot summer.
Production reaches around ten tonnes of fresh rhizomes per year. In Labouheyre, under an unheated greenhouse, “we recreate the subtropical conditions where ginger — organic, from peasant crops in Peru — manages to grow,” argues Patrick Larrère.
“We were pioneers in organic carrots 20 years ago, it’s in our nature to experiment. The Earth is warming, it’s going to be a constraint, so we said to ourselves that it could be an opportunity to do something else thing”, continues the manager who, since this year, has been offering pots of ginger to grow in his living room to “involve the consumer in this effort to relocalize production”.
For almost 10 years, the Larrères have also been making sweet potatoes which supplied the canteen of the Paris-2024 Olympic Village. “We said to ourselves that we also had to adapt to food trends by offering products made on site, rather than on the other side of the world. In Senegal, yields are three times higher than ours but we bet about the future because the sweet potato, the warmer it is here, the better it will work.”
If the latest experiments with turmeric cultivation have not been conclusive, the family is also testing grapefruit or yuzu lemon in the greenhouse.
“In 2100 in the Landes, we will still be making carrots… But Spain will become deserted and France will become the orchard of Europe, he anticipates. We are already seeing olive trees replacing vines in Gironde Maybe kiwis will no longer grow here in Adour but in Lorraine?
