- 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. (gentle classical music)
(cricket chirping) (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)
Amazing, and sad that it's under threat now. Hopefully Jeff and the locals can come to an agreement on hosting a PDC there to help repair it such that everyone benefits.
4 years ago I was in the Valley of the Roses (English name) in Morocco and was impressed then with the varied stories of food producing plantings lining the river valley. Didn't know about food forests then, but recognised the value of a sheltering story and the cropping underneath. What struck me was the many tiny fields, the size of a car port, or courtyard, in which they cropped annuals like grains, and the edges of the fields were where the trees and hedgerows grew.