The Future Farmers of France Are Tech Savvy, and Want Weekends Off
3 min read
At Hectar, a farm in France that serves as a training ground, a veterinarian, Julie Renoux, cares for the cows.Credit...Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times
NYTIMES By Liz Alderman – October 7 2021
An unconventional school wants to attract a new crowd to French agriculture, and help farms earn a profit.
YVELINES, France — On a century-old farm that’s now a start-up campus in this verdant region west of Paris, computer coders are learning to program crop-harvesting robots. Young urbanites planning vineyards or farms that will be guided by big data are honing their pitches to investors.
And in a nearby field on a recent day, students monitored cows equipped with Fitbit-style collars that were tracking their health, before heading to a glassy, open work space in a converted barn (with cappuccino makers) to hunch over laptops, studying profitable techniques to reverse climate change through farming.
The group was part of an unorthodox new agricultural business venture called Hectar. Most of them had never spent time around cows, let alone near fields of organic arugula.
But a crisis is bearing down on France: a dire shortage of farmers. What mattered about the people gathered at the campus was that they were innovative, had diverse backgrounds and were eager to start working in an industry that desperately needs them to survive.
“We need to attract an entire generation of young people to change farming, to produce better, less expensively and more intelligently,” said Xavier Niel, a French technology billionaire who is Hectar’s main backer. Mr. Niel, who spent decades disrupting France’s staid corporate world, is now joining an expanding movement that aims to transform French agriculture — arguably the country’s most protected industry of all.
“To do that,” he said, “we have to make agriculture sexy.”
France is the European Union’s main breadbasket, accounting for a fifth of all agricultural output in the 27-country bloc. Yet half of its farmers are over 50 and set to retire in the coming decade, leaving nearly 160,000 farms up for grabs.
Despite a national youth unemployment rate above 18 percent, 70,000 farm jobs are going unfilled, and young people, including the children of farmers, aren’t lining up to take them.
Daily business updates The latest coverage of business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday. Get it sent to your inbox.
Many are discouraged by the image of farming as labor-intensive work that ties struggling farmers to the land. Although France receives a staggering 9 billion euros ($10.4 billion) in European Union farm subsidies annually, nearly a quarter of French farmers live below the poverty line. France has faced a quiet epidemic of farmer suicides for years.
And in contrast to the United States, where the digital evolution of agriculture is well underway, and huge high-tech hydroponic farms are multiplying across the land, the farm-tech revolution has been slower to take hold. The industry in France is highly regulated, and a decades-old system of subsidizing farms based on size rather than output has worked as a brake on innovation.
The French government has backed some changes to Europe’s mammoth farm subsidy program, although critics say they don’t go far enough. Still, President Emmanuel Macron has sought to rejuvenate agriculture’s image, and has called for a shift to “ag-tech” and a rapid transition toward environmentally sustainable agriculture as part of a European Union plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions by 2050.
Antoine Maché, 32, is a robotics engineer at Neofarm, which operates on just two acres.Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times
But to capture an army of young people needed to carry farming into the future, advocates say, the lifestyle of the farmer will have to change.
“If you say you have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that won’t work,” said Audrey Bourolleau, the founder of Hectar and a former agriculture adviser to Mr. Macron. “For there to be a new face of agriculture for tomorrow, there needs to be a social revolution.”
Hectar’s vision revolves around attracting 2,000 young people from urban, rural or disadvantaged backgrounds each year, and equipping them with the business acumen to be farmer-entrepreneurs capable of producing sustainable agriculture ventures and attracting investors — all while generating a profit, and having their weekends free.
