Sitting in the clammy atmosphere of the greenhouse on the Ferme du château, employees Xenia, Sina and Marine were patiently removing from young cucumber plants the “suckers”, which are the small lateral stems growing off the main vine and which can stunt its growth and yield. At the peak of the season, the vines will reach 3 metres in height, laden with cucumbers and the vegetation will be so luxuriant that making one’s way through the greenhouse will be a challenge. But in early June, it was the first courgettes which were being picked, with an initial harvest of around 400 kilos.
In mid-June it will be the turn of the first tomatoes, arriving later than usual this year because of the fickle weather in May, and soon after that the farm will be buzzing with activity; every July, it produces about one and a half tonnes of tomatoes, and around 250 kilos of runner beans per week. There will be sales deliveries to look after, constant pruning and checking for pest invasions. Come September, other crops will take up the relay, mostly leafy produce like lamb’s lettuce, rocket and spinach.
Xenia, Sina and Marine are among six employees of the Ferme du château, a small organic market-garden farm owned by Gwénaël Floch, situated in the north-west French region of Brittany, and about 40 kilometres south-west of the town of Rennes in the Ille-et-Vilaine département (equivalent to a county). There are seven greenhouses on the farm, and all the work is done by hand; weeding, ridding the leaves of aphids, spreading herbal fertilizer (made on the farm from stinging nettles), and the harvesting. In accordance with the principles of organic farming, the cultivated land takes up just almost a half-hectare of land (4,800 square metres).
With the six, full-time equivalent workforce, and a relatively large volume of production, the annual turnover is around 180,000 euros. That is equal to the turnover of a cereal farm of 130 hectares which, without a workforce, would, according to Mediapart’s calculations, be entitled to around 17,000 euros in yearly subsidies from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, (CAP). Joined to that, cereal farms in France can also be entitled to “green payments” if they meet certain environmental criteria.
Gwenaël Floch’s farm will receive just 338 euros in CAP subsidies for 2020. “That’s practically what it costs me in administrative fees to request subsidies,” said Floch. He began the business 11 years ago, and had to take out loans to fund the necessary investments before the farm was up and running. “I’ve got 30,000 euros per year to pay back on loans until 2025,” he explained. Like his employees, he earns the French legal minimum wage (which is 10.25 euros gross per hour) and lives in modest conditions with his wife and four children.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
CAP subsidies are in large part calculated according to the surface area of a farm, but the Ferme du château is too small to receive these. The small amount it does receive is from ‘leftovers’ in the amount given to France as a whole, and in part this is from funds destined to support organic farming. But that is now due to end with the introduction of a new CAP to run from 2023-2027, a reformed version of that which has been in place since 2015, and about which negotiations are continuing between the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission.
The CAP is funded at a European level to the tune of 58 billion euros, and the subsidies are then distributed among the 27 European Union (EU) member states, which manage the distribution at a national level and set their own particular conditions as to where they go. France receives slightly more than 9 billion euros in agricultural subsidies, and its agriculture minister, Julien Denormandie, has been holding discussions with various actors of the farming sector, and notably farmers’ unions, over how the sum will be used after the new PAC comes into force on January 1st 2023. Last month he outlined the first set of measures for this, what is called a “national strategic plan”, and one of these was the ending of the funding support for organic farms, except for a provision of financial help to those farmers who convert their land to organic farming.
Gwénaël Floch will not only see part of his meagre subsidy disappear, but his farm is also too small to receive a new financial aid package announced by the minister for market garden farms of between 1 and 4 hectares.
“It’s unjust, because organic farming requires technicity and puts us in face of uncertainties that conventional agriculture doesn’t have,” said Floch. “We’re the ones who should be subsidised. All the more so given that I create jobs, I maintain biodiversity, I grow wholesome products. I don’t know how I could be more virtuous.”
Proving his point, while speaking to Mediapart in front of his greenhouses, Floch saw a ladybird on the ground, and picked it up to deposit it inside, where it and others will feed on aphids. “There’s always a solution to avoid using insecticides,” he declared. The farm is irrigated with collected rainwater, while all the produce is sold in a short supply chain system, through sales to the public at the farm, and to two shops in the suburbs of Rennes which are directly supplied by organic producers.
Organic farming methods, which are more demanding in terms of work than conventional agriculture, are the reason that organic produce is more expensive at source, while wholesale dealers and intermediaries inflate the price further. But organic produce, which the majority of the population cannot afford, or very rarely, could be made more affordable if the farms received greater financial support from the state, and if the major retail chains were not allowed to dictate the market.
“It’s a double sentence,” said Floch. “We have no aide for the additional costs of production, and the most [financially] modest [households] can’t buy our vegetables. That makes no sense from the point of view of public health. We’re told to eat five fruits and vegetables per day, and yet it’s the sugar beet producers that the CAP gives massive support to!”
The European commission has fixed an objective that 25% of all farming activity in the EU will be organic (it currently represents 8.5%) by 2030, when it also hopes to have reduced by half the volume of chemical pesticides used today. But meanwhile, the European farming subsidies system favours large farms and the agribusiness, both of whose practices have repeatedly been shown to harm the environment.
Angry at policies he describes as characterised by “cynicism”, Floch sent a letter to French agriculture minister Julien Denormandie last November in which he wrote: “I consider myself to be forgotten by the CAP. We can no longer accept that 30% of French agriculture is excluded, or almost so, from aid from the CAP whereas [that 30%] contributes fully and entirely to reaching the objectives [of the CAP].” The 30% he referred to is the proportion of farms in France with a surface area of less than 20 hectares.
Following that, Denormandie paid Floch a visit to his farm in March, when the discussions on the new CAP and the application of the subsidies in France had begun in Paris. Floch recalled the minister’s complements, telling him that his farm was not a small one but that, “you are a big farm on a small surface area”. But the new measures announced by Denormandie two months later did not address the problems raised by Floch nor those presented to the minister by farmers’ unions.
In May, the French national federation of organic farmers, the FNAB, and the militant small farmers union, the Confédération Paysanne, along with environmentalist NGOs, who had all taken part in the earlier discussions, left the talks, denouncing “a CAP that is immobile in face of current challenges”.
Mediapart understands that during the discussions, the minister accused them of seeking to prioritize established farmers rather than encouraging young farmers to set up a business, arguing that to give more to organic farming would be at the expense of other existing aid, but that at no point in the talks did he raise the idea of reducing subsidies paid to the largest farms, nor question the principle of calculating funding according to surface area.
Earlier this month around 300 organic farmers from across France joined a protest demonstration in Paris called by the FNAB. That was joined by an attention-grabbing campaign on social media in which many appeared in photos naked, except for a placard as a fig leaf, many reading “bio à poil” – a play on words in French, with bio meaning “organic” and à poil meaning “stripped naked”, or “left with nothing” (see more, in French, in this blog post on Mediapart).
Organic market garden farms represent one of the most accessible farming businesses for people seeking to take up an agricultural activity without previous experience. That was the case of Marine at the Ferme du château, and who is this summer working her last season at the farm before launching her own next year. She spoke of a dynamic group of people in the area around Rennes who are similarly preparing to set up small farms. “It’s exciting to see so many people launch themselves into organic farming,” she said. “And on the other side, demand is only increasing.”
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse