- Hi, Geoff here and I'm in Morocco
and I'm in a very special place
because in 1975,
I was on a surf trip
and the surf went flat on the coast here.
We came in land,
looking for a place called Paradise Valley,
where you could swim in amongst date palms.
And on the way, we passed this scene behind me.
And it caught my attention
because there was date palms with fruit trees underneath.
I could see oranges on trees and pomegranates
and figs and grape vines
and it was a whole assembly,
like a paradise to me,
it looked like the paradise we were looking for,
actually that was somewhere else.
We did go and camp and swim but we stopped here
and had a look at this, a date palm overstorey.
Well, I now understand it's a food forest
and I've returned here quite a few times.
And I found out from the local people,
it could be over 2,000 years old
and that's something very sustainable
because it returns enormous amounts of organic matter
to the soil.
It shelters the productive system with it's own shade.
It manages it's own organic matter.
Now, this system's actually under a bit of threat right now
because they are extracting gravel out of the river here,
that they're crushing and adding to roads locally.
And it changed the hydrology
but a system that's 2,000 years old is pretty resilient.
Now, it is fed through a water channel upstream,
up in the valley, that was traditionally maintained
to gravity flood into the system.
So it has a water system but it's a very basic one.
And this is a very interesting system.
And although it's reasonably short time,
I have some heritage here too.
So, we're going to go for another walk around and have a look
because it's something very interesting,
that applies to dry lands, right out here in North Africa
or on the West Coast,
all the way through the Middle East to Central Asia,
wherever traditional date palms are grown,
they become the ideal canopy over a dry land food forest.
And we can put food forests up anywhere
but this is the classic date palm dry land system.
(gentle classical music) (cricket chirping)
There's a small grain crop in the food forest.
It's a crop of sweet corn
with date palm fronds made up as the fence.
Beans and sweet corn and olives and dates,
pomegranate, grape
and date palm, all together.
Here we have carob
and there's some giant carobs throughout the system.
Of course, also under date palm.
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(bird chirping)
Fig trees are also right the way through the system.
This one's reaching up between olives,
it's starting to fruit.
Olives are everywhere through the system.
One of the hardy tree anchors.
And then also you have these little watering gates
in what's now a concrete channel, that's working very well.
So, water switched off in this section
and obviously these gates have recently been opened
and they're all the way along,
little, simple metal gates, handle on the top,
a metal slot in the side of the concrete entry point
and some rocks to back it up.
Well, it's wet enough for frogs, that's for sure.
(gentle classical music) (cricket chirping)
Grapes over olive, under dates.
You definitely don't have to prune date.
Sorry, you definitely don't have to prune grapes
to make 'em more productive.
You get more vine when you let 'em go wild.
They're just a little bit more difficult to harvest.
But who really cares when you've got this much abundance.
(gentle classical music) (bird chirping)
(cricket chirping)
New piles of animal manure appear to be arriving.
It's all very casual and very random.
So, here's a pile of manure
and another pile of manure and another pile of manure.
They're not really spread out.
They're just randomly placed
in this little flood irrigation system
and I can see the soil's damp
and it's actually a little bit of edge work in here
to hold the water under these olives.
This is very, very low tech and very, very basic
but also extremely easy to do
and not labor intensive at all.
Here's a simple block, just some rocks, bit of vegetation
and we're turning the water at a right angle,
going down that way.
(gentle classical music) (cricket chirping)
We've got one of our local Berber farmers here
with his transport system,
the old friendly donkey.
Looks like, he's getting a bit of material,
(Geoff speaking in foreign language)
- Yeah, see.
- See? - Yeah.
- For the (speaking in foreign language).
Yeah, he's fueling up his donkey.
There you go.
Okay, here he is.
(Man speaking in foreign language)
(Geoff speaking in foreign language)
(Man speaking in foreign language)
(Geoff speaking in foreign language)
Yeah, so he's got the, this is the,
feed the donkey when he gets home, just pulling a few weeds.
There we go.
And we've got random manure, again
just random piles around all over this area,
can be flooded, probably going into a crop.
And here's the,
here's what we're carrying on the donkey,
that goes over the donkey's back
and then coming in and then going out
and that's how it's transported.
So, it's definitely a slow food movement, this one
but it's nice.
And it's probably very relaxed
and a lovely way to live in a system,
that's so, so sustainable.
(gentle classical music) (cricket chirping)
(bird chirping)
There's no more bananas.
I can't find any citrus and it's all dry
and there's not many crops under the ground.
So, I asked the locals and they said,
"We had a huge flood that damaged a lot
of the irrigation inlets and now a massive drought."
And now a lot of the rock out of the dry river bed
is getting taken to build roads.
They're still piling manure,
they're getting ready for rain when it comes
and the water level to rise up
and they're actually pumping
from underground to fill the irrigation channels,
just to keep the fruit trees alive.
So, if this is a 2,000 year old system,
at a point in time, where organic matter
is dropping radically low in all industrial agriculture
and food shortage is absolutely imminent.
We're going to have massive famines.
We can't keep turning good land into desert
and let systems that are ancient
and been running for centuries,
if not a few 1,000 years,
we can't let this lesson disappear.
This is the point when we have to choose,
are you going to pay attention
to systems that run on their own cycles of organic matter
and fertility with very, very small inputs.
When I first started researching this system
they told me, 800 people farmed in this area,
under this canopy with all this production.
Now, the young people are moving to the city.
There's just a few old people here, keeping it alive.
The variation in climate, going up and down,
from big floods to big droughts, all that we can work out
but we've got to want to do it,
otherwise it disappears.
I think we should teach a course here,
with the local people, with the local community groups
and attract people in to save these systems
before it's too late.
And we should search out other systems like this worldwide,
in all climates because these are the answer.
And the extension of these systems
through conventional agriculture are the answer
to way we repattern a permanent future for humanity on Earth
in a way that's beneficial to nature.
And we better hurry up.
There you go.
Serious one this time.
Hope you've enjoyed it.
(gentle music)