The future farmers of France are tech savvy, and they want weekends off
YVELINES, FRANCE >> On a century-old farm that’s now a startup 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. 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 one-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%, 70,000 farm jobs are going unfilled, and young people, including the children of farmers, aren’t lining up to take them.
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.
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 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.
Some of those principles are already starting to appear in French agriculture. At NeoFarm, an agro-ecological vegetable farm on a compact 2-acre plot half an hour east of the Hectar campus, four young employees spent a recent afternoon monitoring laptops and programming a robot to plant seeds along neat rows.
NeoFarm, started by two French tech entrepreneurs, is on the edge of a trend in France of investors setting up small farms near population centers, and growing healthy food using less fossil fuel and fertilizer. While big French farms use technology to raise yields and cut costs, boutique farms can use tech to take advantage of much smaller lots, curbing costs and reducing tedious labor tasks to create an attractive lifestyle, said Olivier Le Blainvaux, a co-founder who has 11 other startup ventures in the defense and health industries.
“Working with robotics makes this an interesting job,” said Nelson Singui, 25, one of the workers recently hired at NeoFarm to care for the crops and monitor systems that automatically sow seeds, water plants and harvest carrots.
Unlike other farms where Singui had worked, NeoFarm offered regular work hours, an opportunity to work with the latest technology and a chance to advance, he said. It plans to open four new farms in the coming months.