Pascal Poot is 52 years old, the son of farmers, self-taught (he dropped out of school at the age of 7) and has developed a method for growing 400 varieties of organic tomatoes with almost no water, pesticides or fertilizers. Pascal has been a producer of organic seeds for 20 years on his 3 hectares in the Herault region, France. There, the climate is very dry and the terrain is rocky, but despite the adverse conditions he has managed to make each plant produce around 25 kilos of tomatoes. Poot collaborates with university agricultural researchers. He finds out what his method of growing tomatoes is.
“Everyone grows their vegetables and vegetables protecting them as much as possible; I induce them to defend themselves”
“I started planting tomatoes in this field full of stones 20 years ago and there was not a drop of water.”
«Many of the plants that are now called “weeds” were eaten in the middle ages, I have always thought that if today they are so resistant it is precisely because nobody took care of them and they became more and more resistant generation after generation.
He creates his own seeds resistant to drought and diseases, his method allows him to obtain higher yields than traditional agriculture.
“At first people thought I was crazy since the tomatoes were ridiculously small, my neighbors thought I was crazy because I kept their seeds, but over the years my neighbors realized that with those seeds I got more every year. tomatoes that they and my plants did not get sick; so word of mouth started and several researchers started visiting me.”
A portion of its seeds is sold illegally, since they have not been registered in the Official Catalog of Varieties of Plant Species. The law prohibits the legalization of seeds since “all the seeds, or most of them, were acquired by multinationals that create phytosanitary products and fertilizers, so they are interested in plants needing these treatments to sell their products”.
Pascal harvests seeds that give rise to resistant plants whose parents produced a genetic change.
Pascal Poot Seed Catalogue.
Pascal Poot’s blog.
