Hello all of you and thank you for all your kind words.
For those who read this and do not know me, the story is simple: I went to Europe with our friend Tom Wagner for his potatoes and tomatoes breeding conferences. It was the most beautiful experience of my life and Tom was the most amazing travelling companion one couls wish. He sounds and looks serious, but he is still a young nerdy kid
full of life.
It was amazing. But I left a married man and came back home single, with all the difficulties such a situation brings, and on top of that over 2 acres of my breeding/research gardens where vandalized.
October was really the month where I lost everything...
So it has been though. REALLY THOUGH...
But I am coming back. It still hurts but life, or maybe god, maybe both of them, are helping a lot
Amazing things have happened to me. My garden is now on the grounds of an historical museum/village and I get a lot of help from staff and volunteers and they provide all thr mushroom compost I need ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D and we are talking over a hundred tons here....mind you, I am also regenerating their depleted fields.
I designed 3 historical ''period'' vegetable gardens and I have a huge research garden, we are not even talking the corn patches here, nor the PETIT BLANC D'ALFRED sweet corns I am making seeds of. This is volunteer work of course, but now I am not alone.
I have also made new friends who would fit well here and renewed contacts with many that my married life kept me away from.
I have made the decision to focus my life around seeds and plants, whatever the consequences are financially from now on. If I don't live my dream now I will never...
There is a nice project, potentially scheduled for next year in the air.
At an organic dairy farming conference where I went, I sat alone with a friend on a table to have a quiet lunch, but suddenly all the conference speakers ( all doctors in this and that
) joined us...
One of them, from INRA( french agricultural research institute) started complaining about protein content in corn.Dr Berthiaume, the guy in charge of animal feeding in Canada replied to him. They where all in the 4-6% ball park figure. My friend, knowing about our work here, told him ''maybe you should talk to Michel''.
So I ended up talking about ASTRONOMY DOMINE, our mutual corn project started by Alan and its 14% protein content. The discussion became kind of frantic. I told them that corns around 12% have been around forever, thanks to the natives, and that many corns had a much easier starch to digest ( the flour ones).
Since Dr Berthiaume seemed opened to organic ( turns out he is REALLY into it),I started to discuss my angle of work, using/breeding smaller/dwarf corns. The idea is not only using up less nitrogen from the soil, but also letting the light penetrate between the rows, allowing for intercropping of leguminous crops like red clover, maybe even with beans planted with the corn for a double punch of nitrogen. Smaller corns tend to be earlier often, it also open up the possibility of a fall crop of common vetch that would take root before the frost and explode in April to be turned down in May, before planting.
Dr Berthiaume went to an organic dairy farming conference in Mexico and discused the hypothesis there. People agreed it looked like the way of the future.
I also told him there where many corns very high in amylopectase ( waxy corns). It turns out amylopectase is easier to digest for the cows, meaning more energy to produce milk. On top of that, amylopectase is digested differently by the cows, they do not add an Hydrogen molecule to convert the starch in a trans fat, meaning we could produce more milk and a healthier one with less trans fat.
So Dr Berthiaume called a meeting with the Alfred agricultural college people ( an organic college), Organic Meadows, the country's largest organic coop and a few other players to launch what could be a 7-10 years project....
I sure hope it will work...
Thanks again my friends, I can't come here often,I should get a computer in a few months..
I love you and miss you
Michel
