A Day on the Farm...

From Marsaille we traveled up to the Aix-en-Provence to visit with representatives of the Agriculture industry including President of the National Farmers Union. In the meeting they shared information of how the country deals with farm subsidies. Our first speaker was Claude Rossignol is the Vice President of the Chamber of Agriculture and President of the Regional Farmers Union.

According to some notes from the meeting here are a few things jotted down…
Farmers in France receive 17 Euro's per cubic meter for water. By some rough calculations that's about 201 gallons.
On average, it's about 20,000 Euros for a hectare of tillable farmland with no improvements to the land.
The average farm subsidy is 300 Euro's per hectare.
The average income for farmers in Provence is 29,000 Euros, and 5000 of that is subsidy payment.
Another point made, in the United States, a large portion of consumers can purchase food by choice, i.e. a family who only eats organic products. In France the food purchase is based on price.
Following the meeting we climbed aboard the bus and traveled out of town to an olive farm/winery. Prior to this visit I knew very little about olives except that I don't like to eat them, but we had a very interesting tour and now I even know what an olive tree looks like.
Turns out the olive tree is pretty common in landscaping throughout the area. According to Haccuria, on average an olive tree will produce 180 kilo of olives and generate about 30 liters of olive oil. In 1996 when they created their own olive mill they were converting 100 lbs of olives to 10,000 liters of olive oil. In 2008 the farm will convert 1000 lbs of olives into 100,000 liters of oil through the olive mill you see here.
It takes about one hour to extract the oil from the olive and the by product of seed hull and olive skin is reapplied to the farm acreage to use as fertilizer.
On the Château Virant farm they also produce wine. Like the olive trees the grape vines are located only steps away from their processing facility. Christine attempted to give some insider grape production tips to ALOT members Jay Chism with the University Missouri Extension and Dan Devlin, a row crop producer from Edina, Missouri.
Another little note about wine production, grape harvest begins around August 10th with the same crew they employ for olive harvest. The grapes are slowly squeezed to the juiced can be extracted from the fruit. Once the grape has gone through the necessary process, the product will be in a vat for 10 to 12 hours. For red wine the time in the vat is three weeks. That allows the color of the grape skin to affect the color of the wine.
When you're on a farm, no matter what the commodity, John Crawford with Hamilton State Bank proved farmers still like to check out the farm "toys".

You can take the farm boy out of the "country," but you can't take the country out of the farm boy!!