Saturday, August 13, 2011

You Can Lead a Duck to Water

I was watching the lunch time news the other day on TF1. I say 'news' but it's not quite what you'd expect. The usual ratio is lots of news and a smidgen of 'fait divers' (non news) at the end, but we get 10 mins of current affairs and then 20 minutes of non news. This is designed to promote local regions, inform people about original places to go on holiday and tell them about local specialities.

Actually it's quite a relief from all the depressing bad stuff we keep hearing about, especially this week.

This video is about an organic farmer, Bernard Poujol, who lives at St Gilles in the Camargue. He breeds sheep and grows rice. He also has a flock of ducks which he keeps to weed the rice paddy. The idea comes from Japan where they pioneered the technique. M Poujol got the ducks and trained them himself. They follow him into the rice paddy and then nibble the weeds thus preventing them from proliferating. For some unknown reason, they don't touch the rice at all.

I was so taken with a quacking M Poujol leading his ducks, his environmentally sound approach to agriculture, and the stars of the show - the ducks themselves - that I thought I'd share it with you.