Our farm is located near the Sense river in the Fribourg midland at 800 meters in the mountain zone.

As branches of the farm we lead suckler cow husbandry, dairy cattle rearing (in a farm branch community), arable farming and direct sale of hemp products.

We do not use fungicides and insecticides on any of our arable crops (Extenso program). We also refrain from using herbicides on all arable crops. We can prevent heavy weeding thanks to the use of clover-grass undersowing. As a rule, we sow the undersowing immediately after sowing the respective crop (hemp, barley, wheat, oats, spelt, rye). So far, the undersown seeds have usually grown well; they can either be harvested as fodder or incorporated into the soil as green manure after the crop is harvested. We can also counteract heavy weeding by not using nitrogen fertilizers, but this also lowers yields. Since I have chosen a cereal-heavy crop rotation, the cereal chickadee (a type of beetle) is quite numerous. I hope to be able to limit the cereal chickens and other pests by choosing an undersown mixture supplemented with many herb species.

For hemp, we rely on the Finola variety. The variety is in the EU list of varieties, which guarantees a low THC content. Hemp is very valuable in our crop rotation with many cereals, especially it has good effects on soil properties and against disease pressure in cereals. Sowing is done at the end of April or beginning of May with a drill seeder in rows with a spacing of about 16 cm (the same as the cereals). By the time of harvest in early September, hemp plants of the Finola variety reach a length of about 1 to 1.5 meters. Harvesting is done with a combine harvester, and the seeds are less easily separated from other parts of the plant than in most other crops. For this reason, the seeds must be dried and cleaned as quickly as possible, or alternatively pre-cleaned, dried and cleaned.

For more information on the hemp products & recipes offered, please see the brochure that will be up soon.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.