A short background to where we live.
Without delving into how French communities are divided,
grouped and structured in the judicial sense, mainly because I don’t think I
could really ever fully understand it myself, I will simply use here the
division of a French Departement into “pays” without trying to explain how they
come about.
If we take the Departement where I live, La Vienne, these
days it is sub-divided into 8 Pays as follows which provide a useful division:
Pays Montmorillonnais,
Pays du Haut-Poitou et Clain,
Pays des Six vallées,
Pays des Vals de Gartempe et Creuse,
Pays Loudunais,
Pays Civraisien,
Pays Chauvinois,
Pays de Vienne et Moulière.
and 2 communautés d'agglomération and one area that isn’t
either, (I said it was too complicated for me).
I live in the commune of Blanzay which is in Pays Civraisien and the maps should
give a better idea of where I am writing about and the wider region.
Pays Civraisien:
Overall area : 88 780 ha
Wooded : 11 % with 10 158 ha
Cultivated : 78 % with 70 131 ha
Pasture and meadows: 8 % with 6 970 ha
As can be seen from the 78% “cultivated” figure where I live
the land is dominated by cereal fields. 30 years ago this would have been about
25% and year by year the land turned over to cereals continues to increase.
This is broken up with scattered copses, small woodlands and the occasional
forest. There are a few pastures here and there with a handful of cattle or
sheep but nothing of any consequence and some riverside meadows, some of which
flood.
Recent history.
50 years ago the region wouldn’t even be recognisable as the
same place; non departmental roads were often no more than stone tracks, fields
were small with hedgerows. Maize and oil seed rape weren’t known or grown,
sunflowers were an occasional small scale crop of the more southern regions of France
and wheat varieties were spring sown. Typically
there were small mixed farms such as this 35 hectare farm from the late 1960’s.
Rearing for meat production:
15 calves from the current year,
15 calves from the current year,
15 calves from the previous year,
10 calves of 2 years.
70 sheep raised in the current year.
Livestock:
15 cows for milking.
15 cows for milking.
30 breeding sheep.
Arable:
2 hectares beets,
2.5 hectares of wheat,
3.5 hectares of brassicas,
2 hectares of vegetables,
25 hectares natural pasture / alfalfa / ray grass.
Other farms may have been larger, perhaps up to 100 hectares
but there were also a very large numbers of “farms” of between 10 and 20
hectares.
There were large tracts of poor grass land, sparse scrub and
heather in places most of which has completely disappeared although rare small
pockets still exist as shown below.
It’s probable that 50 years ago every hamlet and farm had at
least one pond and more than one wouldn’t be unusual, almost all being man
made. Although today the Pays Civrasian still has more than 1,000 ponds at
least 50% have disappeared either overgrown or removed and this continues as
they no longer provide any functional use for people or financial benefit.
The late 1970’s and 1980’s saw a rapidly rising demand in both
this region and west / south west France as a whole for sunflowers, maize and
oil seed rape due in large part to a European Community movement to break the
monopoly that the USA had at that time. This in turn lead to the “de-bocage”,
the removal of the hedgerows that divided fields thus creating large plains, a
process that continues today with about 75% of the hedgerows having completely
disappeared. The other important major change was to autumn sown wheat and
barley. Milking cattle were moved into open barns and a large number of farms
have now ceased keeping Dairy cattle altogether, a process that continues due
to poor returns.
Goats that provide the milk for the Goats cheese that is to
be found everywhere are almost exclusively kept in closed barns and sheds where
they spend their lives.
Essentially the "countryside" is now almost devoid of farm animals or natural flora with cereals ruling the roost, big money and big machines.
Even with this much shortened and simplified view of how things were and how things are it should be clear that the
region as a whole has suffered from a serious degradation of habitats with many
species now either severely depleted or completely absent from the region.
Chris
