“The best fertilizer for vegetables is the gardener's shadow”.

Working with Cycle Farm means choosing proximity. Geographical, of course, but above all human.” Sitting on a pallet, Elliott Van de Velde, chef and co-founder of the Entropy restaurant, enjoys the colors and shapes of the morning tomato harvest by David Errera, the market gardener at this microfarm in Linkebeek, just outside Brussels. Microfarm? The term isn't overused: the whole activity boils down to a small plot wedged between houses on one side and a more conventional field on the other.

“We don't grow more than ten ares (or 1,000 m2, editor's note) in net cultivation area,” confirms David Errera. “It's too small to interest traditional farmers, but we still manage to harvest eight tons of vegetables a year. We work all year round here, between sowing periods, putting things in greenhouses, managing the kitchen garden...”

The practice can be defined as “spin farming”, for small plot intensive production, an agricultural model based on the production of high value-added vegetables over a long season.

“But we don't talk about 'intensive' in the sense of using chemical fertilizers, but because we maximize space while doing a lot of rotation,” clarifies the market gardener, pointing to a strip of freshly harvested land. “On a bed (an area of arable land), where a farmer who wants to pass by with his tractor or weeding tools will put in three strips of arugula, I can do twelve!”

And once the arugula has been cut, the soil is covered so that the uncollected parts can be composted. “We'll be able to start again with rich soil and replant very quickly”, adds David Errera, who still has plans to develop his project further. “We're interested in “syntropic” agriculture, which enables us to further increase production thanks to the convergent action of several ecological factors and a good balance between plants, which feed each other¨.