Margily, in Loqueffret (29), in the Arrée mountains. Forty-five cows (Charolais, Aubrac, Salers) feast on blue molinia, tender gorse shoots and a bit of heather on a 65-hectare area of moorland.
With nearly 200 other cattle, in rotation, they will graze for three to four months on a total of 75 ha of moors, thus freeing up the meadows to relieve them and mow them. These cows belong to the Gaec Les Landes celtes founded in 2019 by breeders Rémy Thépaut and Jérémy Stéphan. “Our priority is to support our families, through organic farming, with animals fed almost 100% with grass. We get decent wages from it – we also do poultry – and we help preserve biodiversity. It suits us well, ”they testify.
“If we want to limit the risk of fire”
For Alain Thomas, administrator of Bretagne Vivante, these breeders, among others, embody an ancestral way of grazing and mowing the moors. “Public actors, such as the Finistère departmental council and the Armorique regional natural park (PNRA), should step up their intervention to control land and promote the installation of farmers who would engage in such sustainable approaches” , he suggests. The PNRA is working in this direction, with about forty operators.
“If we want to limit the risk of fire as much as possible, we have to reclaim this know-how. We will plead for it. The priority is not to imagine kilometers of firebreak tracks to circulate trucks and tractors, and which would generate an increase in the frequentation of the spaces to be protected”, maintains the naturalist.
“Might as well put the package on the management of the moor to use it as a natural firewall rather than having fire trails”.
“The trend is not to plant softwoods”
At the Armorique Regional Natural Park, Yves-Marie Le Guen is on the same wavelength. “Might as well put the package on the management of the moor to use it as a natural firewall rather than having fire trails which would disturb the fauna and have negative impacts on biodiversity”, means the coordinator of the Life Landes program d’Armorique, with which Bretagne Vivante is associated, which aims to restore 200 ha of moorland by 2026. of economic value, in September, on a peat bog in Argol”, adds Marielle Chaumien, communication manager of the PNRA.
Chance of the calendar, an Eurasian curlew captured in the Arrée mountains in the spring, equipped with a GPS beacon, sent, this Thursday, a signal from Galicia, in the north of Spain. Another landscape of Atlantic moors where the bird is protected. In the Monts d’Arrée, Bretagne Vivante identified 13 pairs in 2022, compared to 20 until recently.
letelegramme Fr Trans