Page 62 - EarthHeroes

don’t need. She had also volunteered with refugees while living in Asia, and cared deeply about making the world a better place. When she moved to the farm with Charles, the couple were determined to do something positive for the planet and were searching for a way to live that would care for themselves, for nature and for future generations.
Perrine and Charles’s home was a thatched farmhouse surrounded by 6,500 square metres of fields previously used only for grazing animals due to the
poor soil. Perrine and Charles started with a goal of self-sufficiency – wanting to grow healthy organic food without the use of chemicals, to feed themselves and Charles’s daughters, Lila and Rose. They planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden and also kept a few animals – ponies, goats, rabbits, a pig, geese and ducks. In 2005, their daughter Shanti was born, and the following year Charles decided he loved working on the land so much that he wanted to be a full-
time farmer, growing produce to sell as well as eat. Although Perrine was not immediately convinced, soon she too had given up her psychotherapy work to join him.
While the couple needed to greatly increase the amount of food they produced to make their business a success, they didn’t want to use traditional farming methods, which can have a huge impact on the environment. Often land used for farming was originally moorland or forest, important wildlife habitats. Where there were once many types of plants, modern farming often grows only one crop, such as soya or wheat – known as a monoculture – and does not support wildlife in the same way. Over-use of land can destroy its fertility, meaning crops will no longer grow, and so farmers use chemical fertilisers, often derived from oil production, to counteract this. These chemicals often run into rivers, causing pollution that poisons fish and other water life, while use of chemical pesticides can kill insects and birdlife. Worldwide, agriculture is the source of about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from farm machinery and the lorries that transport produce. These farming methods are also unsustainable, because they rely on oil, which will be scarce or unaffordable in just a few decades’ time.
Perrine and Charles decided to stick to their organic principles and to do everything by hand or with horse-drawn machinery. They wanted to experiment with ways of growing the most food possible in the most environmentally friendly way they could.
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