The screening in Aabenraa (south of Jutland/Denmark) was organized by Gerd Grau from Vandværkets Naturgrund (The Waterworks’ Natural Plot) with support from Danmarks Naturfredningsforening (The Danish Nature Conservation Association) in Aabenraa and Aabenraa Kommune (the municipality of Aabenraa). It was completely sold out and we had to bring in extra chairs to be able to seat people that hadn’t been able to get tickets. We had quite a technical talk after the film, about the microbiome in the soil.
We arrived in the morning and had time to visit Ilsøegaard where Claus and Janni Ilsøe farm according to regenerative (chemical-free and plow-free) Landrace Gardening principles, where natural cross-pollination is promoted, resulting in great genetic diversity and the constant emergence of new varieties. Their main focus is also on Lost Crops, which have not been “lost” because of their taste or nutritional content, but because they don’t fit well into large-scale agricultural production with tractors and mechanical harvesting. We tasted Yacon, Mashua and Oca, which are crops from the Andes mountains from the Inca era, but which are well suited for the Danish climate. We were fascinated by how large the yields of these plants are. And the nutritional content, including the protein content, is sky-high in many of these crops!
We also talked about food forests and syntropic farming, which is the method Josipa talks about in the film. Claus talked about how you could reduce the number of snails by having biotopes with beetles that eat snail eggs and larvae, and toads that eat the snails. Ecosystem thinking!
Gerd and Poul showed us the Waterworks. The land is jointly owned by 1000 members. There is a permacultural garden, biotopes, and lots of different trees, shrubs, woody plants, herbs and flowers. There are molehills in some places on the land, and as Gerd says, they help loosen the soil. In other words, they are there for a reason. This place invites you to be in and with nature. We look forward to coming back and experiencing it in the spring and summer.