France's Future Farmers Have Tech Shrewdness, and Want Weekends Off

Hi, I’m Rick Barron, your host, and welcome to That’s Life, I Swear

Future farmers are training to help save the farming industry. At the same time, they’re seeking to make farming sexy and help conquer world hunger.

Let’s jump into this

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.” 

I love quotes, and the one I just quoted is by George Bernard Shaw. His words provide a great segue into our topic today, which is the future of farming.

Here’s an interesting data point that I found on the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] website. 

Back in 1935, the number of farms in the United States peaked at approximately 7 million. Over the years, the decline of being a farmer reached a point where the number of farms in 2020, was 2.02 million. That’s quite a drop.

With 897 million acres of land in farms in 2020, the average farm size was 444 acres, only slightly more significant than the 440 acres recorded in the early 1970s.

Farming is a difficult undertaking, and ownership has been in a downhill spiral for generations. It’s grueling work with sometimes poor returns. Farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input. To be a farmer takes strong dedication, the will to deal with trade wars, severe weather associated with forever changes in the climate, tanking commodity prices, and more.

The volume of farms is shrinking in the United States and worldwide. So, here’s another stat to ponder. According to a report highlighting the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises, one percent of the World’s farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches, and orchards.

What has happened to the farming industry in the United States shows similar trends in Europe. Less than 3% of farms now account for more than half of the farmed land. Moreover, the study finds that the wealthiest 10% of the rural population across sampled countries captures 60% of agricultural land value, while the poorest 50% of the rural population, who are generally more dependent on agriculture, control only 3% of land value.

With the odds of success stacked against you, why would one want to be a farmer today? 

Perhaps the answer is what George Bernard Shaw, stated in his quote noted at the beginning of this podcast… “The people who get on in this World are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”

Today’s farms and agricultural operations are far different from what your parents or grandparents once operated years ago. It’s no longer the horse and plow, or the red tractor your grandparents used to till the soil. Instead, as we move further into the future, advancements in technology, sensors, devices, robotic systems that till the soil, aerial images, data collection, GPS and information technology, are redefining the farm of tomorrow. As a result, the farms of tomorrow can’t be focused just on profitability, but more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Let me share some examples of what’s coming in Agtech So what is AgTech? Sustainable agricultural technology or, more simply, “AgTech,” is an emerging economic sector that can completely reshape global agriculture, dramatically increasing the productivity of the agriculture system while reducing the environmental and social costs of current ag production practices.

As for those who seek to get up and look for the circumstances they want, we go to a   region on the outskirts of Paris, France, in Yvelines. Here we find a start-up campus where individuals are coding and learning to program crop harvesting robots. Across the way, in another section of the start-up, students are tracking cows that have Fitbit-type collars that track their health. On-site is a farm that is unlike your typical farms. This one is without stacks of hay or horses in their stalls. This farm houses laptops where people study various methods to reverse climate change through farming, amongst other learnings.

Who, what, and why is behind this idea? 

The who is Audrey Bourolleau, the founder of this venture called Hectar. She thinks that the young generation looks at farming as working long, grueling hours, seven days a week. That will not fly today in this highly technology-oriented environment. 

To place a new face on agriculture for the future, Audrey calls out a social revolution is what’s needed. She is back up by Xavier Niel, a technology billionaire. 

Xavier is connecting to a movement, not just in France, but the World as well, to transform agriculture as we know it today. He wants to erase the stigma that farming is scorned as labor-intensive work and only equates to one having to battle making it a long-term venture. 

So, what is this new take on farming? The venture is called Hectar, and the goal is to recruit people from urban, rural, or disadvantaged backgrounds annually and train them as farmer-entrepreneurs who can produce sustainable agriculture ventures, attract investors, and generate profits. 

Love the name. FYI, Hectare is a plot of land measuring 100m x 100m or 328ft x 328ft. So, it is about two and half acres.

The Hectar model works like this. Recruits do not have to pay tuition. They go through extensive training in computer coding, learn technology innovations to utilize in farms of tomorrow, and learn the art of being entrepreneurs for taking farming to a technological level never thought imaginable. One key area these recruits are learning how climate change plays a big part of farming. In France, reversing climate change is an issue as 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture.

That said, France shifting from traditional type farming to what is referred to as ‘ag-tech’ is to move in a timely manner towards environmentally sustainable agriculture. It contributes to the goal of eliminating planet-warming emissions by the year 2050.

So why are Audrey and Xavier, so hell-bent on succeeding this venture? France has looked into the crystal ball and sees a labor shortage coming. If not addressed smartly, the deficit will play havoc for the farming industry. 

Today, half of the farmers in France are over 50, with many getting ready to hang it up and retire during the next ten years. It sounds like a lot of time to solve this labor shortage. Not really.

With half the French farmers looking at retirement soon, the impact, if not resolved, will touch approximately 100,000 to 150,000 French farms. While this may not sound catastrophic, consider this. France is Europe’s main breadbasket accounting for a fifth of all agricultural output.

Hectar is not the only outfit to venture into high-tech farming. 

Another venture in France, and not too far away from the Hectar project, is created by co-founders Alexia Rey and Olivier Le Blainvaux, who started NeoFarm in 2018. 

Their approach to the ‘ag-tech’ model is creating ecologically and economically sustainable micro-farms. The objective is to produce organic and local fruits and vegetables while respecting the principles of agroecology. The company seeks to build organic vegetable farms genuinely designed to be robot-friendly while leveraging organic bio-intensive farming benefits.

NeoFarm’s mission is simple, providing the means of establishing an efficient, ecological production model that rewards the producer's effort.

What’s happening with these two ventures is a picture of what the future of farming is becoming, in short, it must happen. The potential of combining future technologies like hydroponics, vertical farming and urban gardening will help deal with a globally growing population more efficiently and thus minimize world hunger.

Throughout time trial and error have brought in innovations that have reinvented how agriculture can be enhanced. For example, stemming from the plow and horse to driven precision farming equipment via global position system or GPS as we call it. 

If we as a world are to provide food to an ever-growing population, we have to constantly find new ways to irrigate crops or breed more disease-resistant varieties. These iterations are vital to feeding the ever-expanding global population with the decreasing freshwater supply.

With food demand enhancing, we are putting more strain on our lands and the output we expect from our farmers. Ponder this. The World’s population is on track to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. That equates to approximately a twenty-three percent increase to the current population of 7.9 billion. That’s like adding another country the size of China! 

It’s now projected that if climate change continues down its path of being ignored by many of us, by the year 2030, the water supply will fall 40 percent short of meeting global water needs. Our World is dealing daily, with increasing environmental pressures, such as climate change and the economic impact of catastrophic weather events, and social pressures, not to mention the push for more ethical and sustainable farm practices, as noted earlier in this podcast. One more global fact. Today approximately 800 million people go to bed hungry.

I’ve been talking about the term agtech. What does this term mean? 

AgTech covers several technologies to enhance crop yields, profitability, better land use, and more. The various sections of AgTech include plant sciences, intelligent farm equipment, agriculture marketplaces and fintech, indoor agriculture, and crop protection.

Like all things, change is not easy. For many farmers making the switch over to adopting this new farming method has been slow. Their reasons are justified. Farmers have been conditioned over the years with teachings of operational agricultural traditions. The cost of operating a farm is enormous enough, not to mention the stress. Investing money into new and new technology innovations is something one is not really to take that leap of faith. For a farmer, their thinking, and rightly so, is what is the return on investment for me. 

That mindset is quickly changing as the workforce in farming is beginning to pass the torch to a new generation, more receptive to this technical shift in agriculture, incoming millennials. A study by Research Hub predicts that millennials will drive 75% of the technological change in the farming industry.

So, what’s the lesson learned here? What’s the takeaway from this story?

Today’s farming is changing not just in France but around the World. Whether you were a farmer 100 years ago, tackling agriculture is and will continue to be about finding innovative methods. While there are challenges to being a farmer today, technology provides how to be more efficient, productive, cost-effective, and reduce the number of hours to manage. 

As noted earlier, there are new technologies out there, not just in France or the United States. For example, countries worldwide are now moving into the new ‘ag-tech’ model that is creating ecologically and economically sustainable micro-farms.

A few of the tech innovations being incorporated in agriculture farming include Hydroponics. 

What is Hydroponics? It is a type of horticulture and a subset of hydroculture that involves growing plants, usually crops, without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in an aqueous solvent.

One of the advantages for farmers with incorporating Hydroponics is control. Other benefits include up to 90% more efficient water use, more crops can be produced twice as fast via a hydroponic system, the setup allows for designing vertical space growth, and more. 

Another technique taking off in the farming industry is vertical farming.

Vertical farming is far from the traditional approach where crops are being grown in huge fields or greenhouses. Some of the key factors that make vertical farming attractive to implement are taking advantage of vertical space and creating production efficiencies. For example, vertical farming uses 40% less power 95% less water and can produce crops as fast as 30 days. 

Think no more seasonal crops. Vertical farming provides the means of producing traditionally seasonal fruit and vegetables all year-round. There will no longer be a “wrong season” as the crops will be grown inside a facility where environmental factors are controlled. There’s that word again that famers like, ‘control’.

By bringing big data management technologies, smart sensors, artificial intelligence systems, and predictive analytics into farming, the AgTech sector can make agriculture far more efficient, precise and resilient in the face of environmental challenges and severe weather.

Five years ago, almost no one knew what Agtech was. But unlike many of today’s tech disruptions – from smartphones to social media – this one is less about consumer convenience or entertainment than about something far more pressing: our collective survival. The reality is that we have to quickly and efficiently bring farming from the industrial age into the digital age.

Years from now, people will wonder what took us so long to move farming into the digitized arena.

With a predicted global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, we’re going to need to figure out how to feed a much larger population and fast. Studies show this could mean we need to grow as much as double the amount of food we do today, to avoid food security issues and mass social disruption. Already, more than 3 million children die worldwide each year because they don’t get enough to eat. At the same time, climate change is making it harder to feed the World through conventional means –with our current rate of crop yields, we’ll only have enough food for half of that projected population.

This is where digital technology has a critical role to play. I’m not talking about developing new, synthetic chemicals to apply to fields or building ever-larger corporate farms. At its core, Agtech uses advanced monitoring and data analysis to do more with less – to find ways to increase yields without burdening already overtaxed resources such as land and water.

Let it be said that a goal to aim for with technological advancements such as Hectar and NeoFarm, plus around the World, will help create ‘smart farms’ but more importantly bring to an end the unnecessary tragedy we face currently every day, world hunger. 

Well, there you go. That’s life, I swear.

For further information regarding the material covered in this episode, I invite you to visit my website that you can find on either Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, for show notes calling out key pieces of content mentioned, and the episode transcript.

As always, I thank you for listening. 

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