the challenge of the transmission of farms in Touraine

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Within ten years, 48% of farm managers will have reached the legal retirement age (source MSA), but farmers are struggling to easily find buyers. The problem ? The price of land continues to rise, it is therefore difficult for young people to raise the money needed to buy a farm.

For nearly 20 years, land of ties facilitates access to land for young farmers. In detail, the association invests, buys land, then leases it to new operators. This was the case recently for Myriam Eddine and Augustin Peschard, two agronomy graduates who have just set up on an organic farm in Louroux. “It’s not that hard to find farms. It’s a question of cost. And for us, it would have been more complicated and longer to set up without the investment of Terre de liens”confirms Augustin Peschard.

The couple matters transform the current farm, which housed a dairy cow farm, into a sheep farm also with a cheese dairy project to process the milk on site.

At Louroux, Myriam and Augustin raise 75 ewes and later hope to have their cheese dairy there. © Radio France
– Mathilde Errard

For the former operator, Dominique Gibon, the transfer with Terre de liens makes it possible toavoid the impoverishment of life in the countryside. “We are more in the same period as the rural exodus in the 1950s, but rather in a return to the countryside at the moment. But, for all that, the farms continue to grow”. Dominique could therefore very well have sold his farm to neighbors, “It would have been done faster if I had accepted that neighbors invest here and take over the farm to expand their own operations”. Corn, “the rural environment, if it’s just a dormitory, that poses a problem for me. So I prefer to see young people settle and arrive in a municipality”.

Dominique Gibon, dairy cow breeder in Louroux, sold his farm to young people through Terre de liens.
Dominique Gibon, dairy cow breeder in Louroux, sold his farm to young people through Terre de liens. © Radio France
– Mathilde Errard

Fight against XXL farmsit is also one of the priorities of Terre de liens, since it also helps to preserve the soil, believes Yves Leborgne, administrator of Terre de liens in Center-Val-de-Loire: “Peasant agriculture, on a human scale, respects the environment more than this industrial agriculture”.

Like Myriam and Augustin, Terre de liens has enabled around forty people to settle in the Centre-Val-de-Loire region in 10 years.


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