If you have gone through the Links page, you’ll notice that I’ve been fiddling with it, adding things, and re-wording things (even right up until a few minutes ago).

One of the links I added was for a TV program called “La Semaine Verte” (The Green Week), which is broadcast every week on Radio-Canada.  This is an intriguing television show on Radio-Canada.  You can watch the episodes online.

As the climate changes and the world’s population increases, the need for sustainable, higher-yielding & more productive agricultural practices will increase.   To achieve this increase in agricultural output, farmers and the livestock / aquaculture industry are always on the look-out for new technologies, better practices, new ideas, or sometimes ways to simply go back to nature.

This show is precisely about these practices.  It’s sort of like a “Popular Mechanics” magazine program for agriculture and the livestock / aquaculture industries.  It’s delivered in short, documentary-style segments.   (For those of you in Western Canada, it’s almost as if The Prairie Farm Report meets The Nature of Things).   Fascinating stuff… It’s really too bad there’s nothing else quite like it in English Canada (and I’m not sure there’s anything else like it in North America).

The show has been on the air for more than 35 years!!  In that sense, it could be considered an “Institution of Québec Culture” in and of itself.

Perhaps its popularity, even with urbanites, comes from the fact that Québec has always been conscious of the management and eco-practices associated with its natural resources and environment.   With the exception of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region (a 10 hour drive North of Montréal), there is only a thin band of highly productive agricultural land on either side of the St. Lawrence River.   It’s a place where agricultural land is in intense competition with towns and cities (this is where 85% of Québec’s population also resides).

In the early 1980s, the René-Levesque government famously passed “ground-breaking” legislation (no pun intended) to protect remaining agricultural land from the encroachment of cities (something all people in Québec have to learn about in school).   That’s likely one of the reasons why “La Semaine Verte” remains such a popular show (if there is only so much land to go around, and if it is not an infinite resource, then it’s in everyone’s interest to make sure it is managed as best as possible using the latest technology, sometimes even bordering on “Star-Wars” technology).

Check out some of its episodes.  You can stream them on the show’s official website here:  http://ici.radio-canada.ca/tele/La-semaine-verte/2014-2015/episodes

If you’re learning French, this would be a good show to help you develop an earn and increase your vocabulary.  It is narrated in an average (not too fast) pace, in International French, and it can offer you a host of new vocabulary about farming, industry and environmental matters.

It’s broadcast on Radio-Canada every Saturday at 5:20pm, rebroadcast every Sunday at 12:30pm, and again on RDI every Saturday at 6pm.   It’s broadcast coast-to-coast to all residents across Canada.