Marc Bonfils wheat and cereals resources

All documents I have found available in English
How to grow winter wheat The Fukuoka-Bonfils method.pdf (278.5 KB)
Natural Agriculture Winter Wheat in Northern Europe According to the Fukuoka Bonfils Method.pdf (60.7 KB)
The Harmonious Wheatsmith inspired by Marc Bonfils.pdf (1.0 MB)
Winter Wheat and its Physiology According to the Fukuoka Bonfils Method.pdf (190.2 KB)

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5 documents I have found available in French, written by Bonfils:
BONFILS fiche Génétique du blé.pdf (7.8 MB)
BONFILS fiche synthétique sur le blé.pdf (6.6 MB)
BONFILS Réfutation de la théorie des exportations d’éléments fertilisants par les plantes cultivées.pdf (594.1 KB)
BONFILS toutes les fiches synthétiques de ses recherches.pdf (3.1 MB)
Marc BONFILS Culture du Blé en terre Sablonneuse.pdf (1.3 MB)

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3 others, inspired by Marc Bonfils - still in French
Culture naturelle du blé dhiver selon Bonfils par P BESSE - inspirĂ© de Marc BONFILS.pdf (6.7 MB)
Fiche synthĂšse La méthode Bonfils - inspirĂ© de Marc BONFILS.pdf (200.3 KB)
Fiche technique Association blé et trèfle blanc - inspirĂ© de Marc BONFILS.pdf (84.6 KB)

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2 other links and download links to documents (in French) too big to upload to this Discourse page (max 30MB
) so if somebody has the ability to compress those files I woul be grateful for him doing it and uploading it right here in order to have the resources right on the same page, for those interested:

Then, for French speaking people, do not hesitate to listen to this extract of a 1986 training course on his methods of permaculture, partially inspired by Fukuoka: Semis ultra-précoce de blé - Marc BONFILS - YouTube

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If interested, you could also have a look at Percival wheat monography:

Many transcripts of experiments are included.

Dated from 1921.

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Reading 280 pages of handwritten notes sounds like a giant project! I hope your notes are not handwritten :slight_smile: I would love to learn more about this for a future grain project. @Lowell_McCampbell maybe knows about these people? I found this document

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I don’t believe I’ve heard of this person before! I’m reading the first few pages now and I love it :slight_smile:
Had a lot of ant problems this year in certain areas where I planted and in others minimal to none. Ants seem to be the biggest challenge but may be overcome more easily with hulled or difficult threshed grains that are left in the hull to plant.
@ThomasPicard Are you growing cowpeas? They do wonderfully in hot summer weather for me even with minimal rain.

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If it helps, I have found this document:
https://www.pdfdrive.com/des-recherches-de-marc-bonfils-d57940096.html

Marc, do you know if there was any connection between Marc Bonfils and Emila Hazelip?
It seems they have both been advocating “synergistic gardening”.

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@julia.dakin @WojciechG
This document is very synthetic : Permaculture: Nat Ag Winter Wheat in N Europe by Marc Bonfils : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
(You can download it from archive.org)
I know he has been working with E. Hazelip but don’t know much about that.
The Wheat Monography of Percival I was talking about can be found here:
The Wheat Plant A Monograph : John Percival : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

(by the way : by uploading documents to the archive.org website those documents are supposed to be protected, thus you will find a link to the Waybackmachine search engine which is frequently very useful to find broken links)

Bonfils greatest achievement has been to prove his systems -first conceived theoretically- worked practically, seeing yields improve year after year, thanks to his timings of sowings, densities, and ways to deal with the clover cover. His yields went from 9T/ha to 11-12T, and then to 14-15T/ha, which was and still is better than the highest yields obtained in industrial agriculture. BUT
 first I still can’t find any pictures taken from his experimental fields
, and there has been nearly no follow up of his methods: for more than a decade now, farmers consider more and more early sowings as ways to obtain better plant growth, then yields, but Bonfils’more radical approach : sowing winter wheat in June (against october to december), ultra-low density (4-5kg/ha against 250kg/ha), permanent clover cover (against tilling, herbicides in conventionnal agriculture / or many soil works in organic ag - both first hurting then killing the soil
 ) seems still to be too far fetched. Anyway: pionneers regard now his work as a source of inspiration. Many tests and local adaptations have to be made.
what he is developping throughout his notes sounds 100% consistent with other academical knowledge, so I am quite confident his revolutionnary approach could be updated, and, why not?, adapted to other crop productions
 which I intend to try

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I just read this article and thought it was worth plugging in here: Continuous Grain Cropping | The Land Magazine

Thank you Christopher, very intersting piece actually