“It breaks like glass because there is no more water, it has dried up completely, there is no more life”.
In his Graves plots near Bordeaux, Dominique Guignard, wine grower, crumbles vine leaves between his fingers.
He can only observe the damage of two successive nights of frost.
In the Drôme, Daniel Betton, an arborist who works 55 hectares of apricot trees in Mercurol-Veaunes, has also lost almost everything in a few days.
“No matter how much we had to heat, heaters and all, that was not enough with the temperatures going down to -4, -5 degrees.
We cannot protect.
Most of the buds are unrecoverable.
The harvest is lost for this year, ”he breathes, his throat tied.
In all the regions where the cold suddenly set in at the start of the week, the sad observation is the same: whether they are winegrowers, arborists, farmers… The damage is immense.
Despite sleepless nights lighting heating candles or braziers around their plots, to protect their crops from freezing, this was not enough.
If for the time being, the damage is still difficult to quantify, the first upsurges lead to fear the worst.
"It's a historic crisis, because the last one that we experienced and which is on the shelves was 1991, and we went lower on Thursday in temperature," declared André Bernard, vice-president of chambers of agriculture in charge of the risk management file.
At 63, he even admits not having known “such a violent and broad frost episode”.
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"We lost a whole year of work"
“Morally, it's super hard, it's very violent.
I have the impression of having put on one knee, testifies David Joulain, who cultivates seven hectares of almond trees in Manosque, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
On all the samples that I have taken, it's dead, I'm afraid of having lost the whole harvest ”.
The Ministry of Agriculture Julien Denormandie announced on Thursday that he was going to launch the implementation of the agricultural disaster regime, without specifying the amount of the envelope.
Because the crisis facing farmers is likely to worsen.
Professionals still fear another drop in the thermometer expected early next week.
It will therefore take several more days to quantify the losses.
