The Agricultural Show is coming to an end. It will close its doors this Sunday, March 5. Throughout the week, the thousands of visitors to Porte de Versailles were able to see how agriculture is being modernized with the presentation of new technologies. A look at changes in the agricultural world with sociologist Jean Viard.
The Salon de l’Agriculture, open since February 25, Porte de Versailles in Paris, closes its doors this Sunday, March 5. Thousands of visitors have discovered the new technologies put at the service of farmers, in an agro-economic sector that has always known how to modernize and evolve. Except that today, the objectives are perhaps a little different, because the stakes are different. The sociologist Jean Viard deciphers for us this question of society.
franceinfo: Today Jean Viard, are we no longer just trying to simplify the tasks of farmers?
John Viard: So it’s complicated. Sylvie Brunel, has just released a book with Buchet-Chastel, which is called Feed, let’s stop mistreating those who make us live! And basically, it says well: let’s not do with agriculture what we did with industry, that is to say that basically, we have broken, to a large extent, our industrial tool , because we no longer had the desire for this type of job, and we mainly exported the production, and now we are rowing to bring it back.
There is somewhat the same risk with agriculture. There were 3 million farms in 1945, there are still 350,000. We have completely concentrated, it is more and more technical, most farmers have completed higher education, in agricultural schools, they are often passed through the university. It has become an extremely complex business, and at the same time, society’s demand has changed. We are engaged in the climate war, and in the climate war, the question of ‘growing’ becomes absolutely central. We are facing a great revolution. But the problem is that France has always modernized with agricultural policies.
In 1789, it’s very rare, we made a huge land reform, nobody did that. Then, in 1870, we made the 500,000 local elected officials, we made the peasant republicans and landowners, the soldiers of the Great War. Then, de Gaulle arrived in 1960, he said: the colonies, there are no more, we eat in France, the peasants, you will become productive producers. They have become productive producers. But today, who is talking about the fourth agricultural pact? Who talks about the essential role of land, land, forests, in the revolution we are experiencing?
And the problem is there. On the one hand, the peasants are modernizing and defending themselves. They are often still in the culture they inherited from their parents, which is that of De Gaulle, even if they have changed enormously. And on the other side, the people of the cities would urgently, at full speed, want us to change completely, whereas they are often not capable of growing a carrot. We live in times like these, when, basically, politics does not support the fourth agricultural pact which will be an ecological pact, perhaps the peasants will no longer be landowners because they spend their lives reimbursing farms . It’s a profession that is becoming very, very technological. Increasingly, fields are being tracked on the Internet.
We will soon have electric tractors that will go into the vineyards on their own, at night, there will no longer be a need for pilots. We are moving towards this technological agriculture, the problem is that it has to be technological, and at the same time, very organic, so there is all that at play. And then, what is very clear after the pandemic is that organic products have stalled a little, on the other hand, local products have increased. There is this whole question of the ‘local’ which is also an element that comes into play.
The risk of modernization is also to want bigger, to produce more. And today, we have a concentration effect which means that we have small farms dying in the countryside?
Yes, but you know it, in France, we always like what is small, and not what is big. So, there may be small farms that are remarkable. Go to Aubrac, for sure it’s heaven for cows, or beef or veal, but at the same time most of our meals are made by price first, whether in modest backgrounds, or whether in collective catering. So you have to make ends meet, the myth of the little peasant who has his 20 cows etc., it’s perfect, as a luxury model. But is it a consumer model?
The problem, it is very largely how large production becomes a production which makes less chemical inputs, which develops more work techniques. Look in the vines. There are 85,000 farmers who are actually winegrowers out of the 350,000. There are lots of places where we have made huge technological advances in the vineyard, with machines that pass between the rows, but which pass between the feet at the same time. So we no longer need to use weed killer. You see, there are also all these technological innovations that are part of the solutions to get out of chemical agriculture of our previous generations.