{"id":3499905,"date":"2024-02-13T13:18:23","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T13:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3499905"},"modified":"2024-02-13T13:18:23","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T13:18:23","slug":"farm-to-forms-the-epicness-of-trying-to-establish-and-run-a-farm-in-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-02-13\/farm-to-forms-the-epicness-of-trying-to-establish-and-run-a-farm-in-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Farm to Forms \u2013 the Epicness of Trying to Establish and Run a Farm in France"},"content":{"rendered":"

As protests by French farmers continue, we look deeper into the reasons for their frustration. Marie Halicki, a soon-to-be freshly installed farmer in the French Alps, shares her experience wading through the quagmire just to become a farmer. This is translated from French.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tonight, even if I don\u2019t agree 100% with all the agricultural blockages, I must nevertheless share my feedback on my installation journey.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve worked in tourism and sales, I\u2019ve scrubbed the filthy aisles of a large supermarket in Grenoble, I\u2019ve run as a salaried employee behind sheep for 9 months, I\u2019ve cleaned cows\u2019 udders in the Beaufortain, I\u2019ve done educational work with kids, and I\u2019ve been working under horses\u2019 feet for ten years. All that, put together, adds up to a lot of work.<\/p>\n

But would I ever have imagined that all this, all these hours of hard work, organisation and reflection, would be a mere drop in the bucket compared to my farming business?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been raising ewes as a hobby breeder for 3 years (officially, because unofficially, I\u2019ve had ewes at home for 9 years). Then one day came the crazy idea of starting up as a farmer, \u201cfor real\u201d. To set up with my partner, on his family\u2019s land, and take over the farm that had been handed down from generation to generation for ages. And that\u2019s when you get slapped, phenomenally slapped. Administrative slaps, which slow you down like a reinforced concrete wall can slow down the momentum of a poor, longing fly. I\u2019ve had the feeling for over a year now (installation procedure launched in October 2022) that I\u2019m swimming the butterfly in a huge molasses bath or a huge Olympic swimming pool filled with heavy semolina. And if that wasn\u2019t enough, there are administrators around the pool who press your head underwater with their foot, just to see if those with real bite will make it to the end without drowning.<\/p>\n

The first group meeting takes place via the Chamber of Agriculture, to \u201ctake stock\u201d. With a speaker full of certainties who assures me that I won\u2019t have access to VAE because I don\u2019t have \u201cone year\u2019s salaried agricultural experience\u201d. Without VAE, no BP REA (Brevet Professionnel Responsable d\u2019Entreprise Agricole). Without a BPREA, no DJA (Dotation Jeune Agriculteur \u2013 Young Farmer\u2019s Grant, a big push to avoid hanging yourself in the first year of setting up). However, I did get my BPREA, thanks to a VAE and a super advisor in La C\u00f4te-Saint-Andr\u00e9, who guided me expertly. Many thanks to her. 70 pages of documents (more than my master\u2019s thesis!) and 3 months later, I had my BPREA. Then you meet a lawyer, an accountant, two lawyers, two accountants, and you ask yourself more and more questions. Because the choices you make now will commit you for the next 30 years of your life. And you can\u2019t really go wrong. Because you\u2019re not just committing yourself to equipment, you\u2019re committing yourself to beasts, animals, little brebinettes and cows that will earn you a living for all those years. They\u2019re not just \u201clivestock\u201d to me, they\u2019re my daughters, my little prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the molasses-filled pool, you take a breath, even if it means you end up apneic, and you keep going. Because for ten years now, we\u2019ve been lending a hand or working for free on this project, no longer going on vacation or sacrificing weekends with friends for all this (sorry, by the way, friends, for all the days and evenings I\u2019ve put aside for this project).Then you have to come up with the money. 2,700\u20ac to register the company, get a legal status, a SIRET number and leave the job to someone else to scrape up the paper. Then \u20ac30,000 to create the EARL shares. Then there\u2019ll be the cows to buy, the equipment and, maybe one day, the land and buildings (because 15 years of salaried work and self-employment aren\u2019t enough to pay for a mixed crop-livestock farm, even when there are two of you setting up). \u00a0Not far from \u20ac250,000 all told. It stings. It stings, very, very hard.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll have to hold out for quite a while, hoping one day to see the end of the pool. Then it\u2019s time to start the real DJA process. And I can hear some people saying from here: \u201cYes, but it\u2019s public money after all, so it\u2019s somewhat normal that you\u2019ll be asked for files and supporting documents in order to get the money\u201d\u2026 I\u2019ve received money in spades for professional training: \u20ac10,000 from the region for my riding instructor diploma, then another \u20ac8,000 for my Alpine Shepherd training, then a few months\u2019 unemployment. All in all, not far from \u20ac20,000. At the time, all I was asked to do was fill in a form and I was on my way. There was nothing in return, apart from finishing the few months I\u2019d spent on the course (and it wasn\u2019t high-flying, if that\u2019s what you think).<\/p>\n

As a farmer. No way. For the same amount of money, you\u2019re going to have to spend hours in the office, in front of the computer making your eyes bleed to understand legal and tax terms, commit yourself for at least 4 years to an economic trajectory, train yourself, fill out more files\u2026 and return the famous DJA if you don\u2019t reach your objectives. It\u2019s not very common to hand back the DJA, but that\u2019s probably because the farmers who make the commitment are too passionate to stop, or too scared. Not to mention the Authorisations d\u2019Exploiter to be applied for (which are still different from leases or tenancies, and still different from CAP declarations), the spreading plans to be drawn up, the health booklets to be filled in, the vet appointments for prophylaxis (compulsory blood tests every year for the entire herd in the case of cattle, and every 3 years in the case of sheep, on samples from the flock), the suppliers to be called back, the seeds to be ordered, the weather to be checked, not to mention sleeping and eating. And all this, of course, in between lambings, miles on the tractor or in the middle of the meadows, making parks, when it\u2019s raining, when there\u2019s a storm, having the bottoms of your boots splitch splitch and your underpants soaked. In the midst of people who take their dogs to shit in your fields because \u201cit\u2019s just grass\u201d and you, the farmer, are seen as just the latest asshole because you plow on Sundays making noise while it was the family reunion (but no one wonders if you didn\u2019t want to be with your family on that same Sunday, because it\u2019s the only beautiful day in the middle of a storm of rotten days).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t give up. I love it too much, even if it hurts sometimes, and we\u2019re bored to death moving forward in a knife-edge fog. It gives me too much pleasure to hear my sheep bleating when I arrive, to see them running down the slope with my patou for a few strokes, some kibbles and a bit of barley. But I\u2019d like to see one day a one-stop administrative office, with understanding people who can give us real solutions, who don\u2019t make us wait 15 hours to fill in the same form 40 times with the same information, only to tell us after six months that your identity card has expired and that it\u2019s going to be delayed again. Accountants who give us solutions tailored to our specific circumstances, instead of throwing Wikipedia-worthy explanations at us for \u20ac3,000 a year, while consulting the accounting results with an air of \u201cthat\u2019s not so good\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 15 days, I\u2019ll have a one-day skills assessment, followed by 3 days of Personalised Professionalization Plan (PPP, clearly for PAN PAN PAN). Before I\u2019ve even put a toe in a tractor, I\u2019ve already filled in, sent off and forwarded around twenty different documents, ranging from accounting to \u201csustainability analyses\u201d, financial projections, installation project diagnostics, which will have to be completed by additional analyses and so on. A pace of life reminiscent of my preparatory classes for the ENS entrance exam \u2013 6:00 a.m.\/11:00 p.m., every day, with no vacations or outings. And I\u2019m not even talking about the technical documents I had to swallow to complete the sum of knowledge (necessary) for the management of living organisms \u2013 we\u2019re talking thousands of pages.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m not in a tractor tonight (we won\u2019t really have enough money to renew the farm\u2019s old-timers over the next few years), but I\u2019m thinking hard about all those who are tearing their hair out over the insane amount of documents to be filled in, sent back and countersigned just to have the right to work. If I only had one wish, it would be to spend more time with my sheep and less with my computer\u2026 because you can eat a leg of lamb with onions and cooked carrots\u2026 you can\u2019t feed a nation on paper and computer components.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I only had one wish, it would be to spend more time with my sheep and less with my computer\u2026 because you can eat a leg of lamb with onions and cooked carrots\u2026 you can\u2019t feed a nation on paper and computer components.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3499910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79719,213531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3499905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foodwater","category-food-water-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3499905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3499910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3499905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3499905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3499905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}