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To Keep Clean Drinking Water Flowing to Paris, Farmers Are Going Organic
The bright, late morning sun lights up the wooded hills and swooping valleys of the Pays d’Othe, a bucolic farming region about 100 miles southeast of Paris. In the foreground, a charming stone aqueduct cuts across the green fields in this snapshot of early summer.
“That’s the Aqueduct of the Vanne,” says Zoltan Kahn, gesturing over to what is a small portion of the 156-kilometer network built by Baron Haussman, the former prefect of Paris, in the late 19th century. “It carries water all the way to Paris.”
The Vanne, which supplies a fifth of Paris’s tap water, is fed by the water sources in these parts. Home to one of the largest forests in France, the region is rich in biodiversity and has been a key drinking water catchment area for centuries.
Zoltan Kahn. Credit: Peter Yeung
Yet with France’s growing intensification of farming in the 1960s — making it today the leading European agricultural producer, with about 18 percent of the continent’s output — that changed. To ramp up productivity, French farmers began to use more chemicals on their crops. Those fertilizers and pesticides in turn made it into major water supplies, in particular the watersheds that eventually would flow to Paris.
For many years, that was accepted as the norm. Costly water-processing plants were built to clean up the water in cities across the region and in the French capital so that it was safe enough to be used for drinking by large urban populations.
But with the rapid onset of climate change, which is tightening use of water reserves and triggering droughts in France and across the world, that approach is no longer seen as viable. Instead, the city now believes that water supplies must be protected at the source.
“We have to take a more sober approach to water use,” says Dan Lert, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of the ecological transition, climate plan, water and energy. “We cannot afford to be wasteful and polluting in the time of a climate crisis.”
Since 2020, Eau de Paris, the city’s public water service, has been supporting farmers near its watersheds — spanning from Normandy in the north to Burgundy to the southeast — to reduce the use of pesticides and fertilizers on their crops. In other words, to go organic.
Zoltan Kahn is one of those farmers. The 48-year-old has 180 hectares of agricultural land in the Pays d’Othe, where he has been tilling the fields since 2006. In the past, Kahn, who was conscious of the environmental impact of chemicals, had a deal with a local poultry abattoir to use the remains of the birds to fertilize his land. But the smell it created proved off-putting. “Wind blew the stench to the villages,” he says.
So, when Kahn was approached by Eau de Paris with support to go fully organic, he jumped at the opportunity.
In exchange for switching to organic, he would receive a so-called “Payment for Environmental Services” for each hectare of his farmland cultivated every year as well as technical support and agricultural advice from a coordinator in the area.
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