Sentinel flowers to save watermelons

“We needed to break with monoculture and create a favorable environment so that the native auxiliary fauna could stay,” says the farmer. They tried first planting about 30 floral species on the roads, observing what happened and which species they attracted. Would the flowers be able to attract the enemies of the aphid and become sentinels of your watermelon fields?

From there, they took the three that could serve their objectives. They would be the flowers that would bring diversity to their watermelon crops and that would help establish an ecosystem that would regulate pests by itself. At VerdCamp Fruits they became pioneers: what they were doing – and which, as Mas explains, was not happening in the fields then – was 'intercropping', or intercultivation, combining species in the fields to achieve better results.

Now, at the same time that the watermelons are planted, they also plant the flowers. They have been using flowers as sentinels for their watermelons for years. This saves insecticides, which frees the soil of chemicals and represents economic savings. «Add an average of 50 euros per hectare to a dose of chemical insecticide against aphids, plus about 40 for machinery; “It can cost us 90 to 100 euros,” Mas calculates. Taking into account that they could need 3 to 5 treatments per harvest and that now they only plant flowers once for between 40 and 50 euros, the bill takes care of itself.

Flowers not only reduce this expense, but also expand the biodiversity of those fields. For example, they have enhanced the presence of bees, which first improves pollination and then production. There are also more butterflies and other auxiliary species. From CREAF, which has included this farm in its Regenera.cat project, they add that planting flowers can favor the soil's capacity to store water and CO2.

This way of working the land even has intangible advantages, but they impact those who cultivate it. More talks about emotional benefits. “The countryside must be beautiful and beautiful,” he says, something that monoculture does not achieve. For those who spend the day among the watermelon rows, this matters.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the idea of ​​mixing crops is becoming a rising value. If when they started VerdCamp Fruits they did not have many expert sources to ask, things are different now and research and experimentation is already underway on this issue. Intercropping could be the answer to many of the questions that the countryside is asking in the midst of this climate emergency context, from how to confront drought to how to maintain a balance with the environment and protect ecosystems.

“It is difficult to change, but it is necessary,” summarizes Mas. «Agriculture as we know it is not profitable. We have to make changes and brave changes,” he explains. The climate emergency forces us to rethink what is done, what fails, what impact it has on the environment and how things could be done better.

One of these ongoing studies is the Leguminose project, coordinated by the University of Florence and which has a European scope. The objective is to analyze the potential of mixing legume and cereal crops. In fact, its participants have just met in Spain, in a meeting organized by the Spanish partners, the CSIC and the Union of Small Farmers and Ranchers (UPA), to follow the progress.

There are currently 7 trials underway on the continent, with 150 'living labs' (11 in Spain) in which associations between barley, vetch, wheat, yeros, broad beans or chickpeas are tested. The idea is to recover the benefits that legumes provide to the soil structure. Although in recent decades the planting of legumes has stopped, intercropping could be one more on the list of benefits that push them to recover.