Luxembourg: the happy country that loves its plants

Short, illustrated books about plants, soil, food and farming for children from Class 1 to Class 10, anywhere in the world. Laisha Review will bring you one new manual in every issue. This month: What Is a Plant?, a first book about the green living things that feed the world, made to be read aloud by a grown-up, or read by a strong early reader.

Look out of a window. What can you see?

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour: what animals do, how the behaviour is produced, how it develops, what it is for and how it evolved. Welfare science asks a related question: how is this animal faring, in its body and in its experience, in the conditions in which it lives and dies? The two belong together, because behaviour is the most direct window a veterinarian has into how an animal feels. The World Organisation for Animal Health lists animal welfare among the Day 1 competencies of every graduating veterinarian.

Ethology asks four classic questions about any behaviour: what causes it, how it develops, what it is for and how it evolved. Young animals pass through sensitive periods; puppies are most open to socialisation from about 3 to 12–14 weeks of age, kittens from about 2 to 7 weeks. Learning runs from habituation, getting used to a harmless repeated stimulus, to associative learning, in which reinforcement makes a behaviour more likely and punishment less likely. Behaviour rewarded unpredictably is the hardest to extinguish.

Stand at the edge of a flowering orchard on a warm morning and listen. The hum is the sound of a service that no farmer invoices and no market prices.

Laisha's manual on ecosystem services and pollinators starts from a simple idea: farms are ecosystems. They depend on services that nature provides, from the bees that carry pollen to the soil organisms that build fertility, and they in turn produce food while changing the services that neighbours downstream, and people in the future, will receive.

The grapevine, Vitis vinifera, carries a name given by Linnaeus himself: Vitis is Latin for “vine”, and vinifera means “wine-bearing”. Angur, üzüm, inab, Traube, uva, vinograd and stafyli are all names for this same plant. Its partnership with people is among the oldest in farming. Residues in pottery jars about 8,000 years old, found at two sites in Georgia, are currently the earliest confirmed evidence of winemaking, and a complete Copper Age winery, with a press, fermentation jars and grape pips, was found in the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, dated to around 4100 BC.

Today the vine grows around the Mediterranean, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, in southern Africa and the Middle East, and on the temperate coasts of the Americas and Oceania. In Luxembourg, this issue's country, the vineyards line the Moselle on the eastern border, giving white wines and the sparkling Crémant de Luxembourg. The little wine village of Schengen, which gave its name to Europe's border-free travel agreement, sits among them.

Most of Laisha is about work: manuals, grow guides, diagnosis, planning. Laisha Run is the one thing in Laisha that is not trying to help anybody grow anything. People who spend their days on real fields deserve a few minutes of play, and a tool that is only ever work is a tool people put down.

The idea is simple. You sprint down a farm trail that never ends, with mountains on the horizon, a windmill and a farmhouse along the way. Produce appears in your path to grab. The hazards of a working farm appear to dodge. The longer you last, the faster and busier the farm becomes.

Every grower knows the feeling: a patch of yellow leaves, a spot that was not there last week, a crop that suddenly looks wrong. Crop Health is Laisha's photo-based crop diagnosis, built for that moment. You send one photo of the whole plant and one close-up of the affected leaf, stem or fruit, add the crop name and whatever you know, and it returns a structured report: what the evidence shows, the possible cause groups, what to do in the next 24 hours, a seven-day watch plan, and a short brief you can forward to an agronomist.

It accepts several photographs of the same problem and reads each in turn, because one leaf rarely tells the whole story. A pattern that looks like disease on a single leaf often turns out to be the shape of the problem in the field: worse at the edges, worse in the low corner, worse on one variety.

Sprinkler and micro-irrigation are the two families of pressurised irrigation. In both, a pump or a raised tank pushes water through closed pipes, and the water leaves through a device, a sprinkler nozzle, a dripper or a micro-sprinkler, whose flow depends on the pressure at that device. That single fact explains almost every design rule in the subject. If pressure varies too much along the pipes, flow varies, the crop is watered unevenly, and the farmer must either over-irrigate to satisfy the driest spot or accept lost yield where water falls short.

The subject sits between fluid mechanics and agronomy. The engineer starts from the crop's water need and the soil's intake rate, adds pipe friction and pump curves, and turns them into spacings, pipe sizes, zones, filters, fertiliser injection and a pump that runs efficiently.

Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries in Europe; you could drive across it in about an hour. It is landlocked, with no coast, but it has plenty of rivers: the Moselle, the Sauer (Sûre), the Our and the Alzette. Its capital, Luxembourg City, shares the country's name. The old quarters and great stone fortifications stand high above deep green valleys and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city is one of the official seats of the European Union.

Most children grow up learning several languages. Luxembourgish is the national language, spoken at home and in the street; laws are written in French; many newspapers use German; and lots of people also speak English and Portuguese.