Son of a farmer, David Joulin decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps: “I never understood that he works like a convict, ninety hours a week, for a salary of 500 to 1,000 euros. » However, he has not left this universe, he who co-founded, in 2015, the start-up Ekylibre. The young company has developed farm management software that makes it easier to track expenses, stocks or shipments, promising its customers to save time.
Mr. Joulin is part of this generation of entrepreneurs, often young and with rural roots, convinced that new technologies will come to the aid of an ailing industry. This is also the speech of Jérôme Le Roy, the president of La Ferme digitale, an association which brings together 120 young startups in the sector: “Agriculture is faced with problems of income, attractiveness, reconciling performance and respect for the environment. We have answers to all these questions. »
The scope of action of these companies covers the entire spectrum of activities (crops, livestock, fishing), from production to distribution including management or training, and takes all forms, from software solutions to physical tools ( robots, vertical farms, sensors, etc.). Increasingly, these solutions integrate research advances, like the start-up Mycophyto, co-founded in 2017 by microbiologist Justine Lipuma, which developed a process for cultivating mycorrhizal fungi, capable of combining to plant roots to dig deeper into the soil for nutrients or capture water during periods of drought. “Our initial observation was that a lot of knowledge from laboratories did not reach farmers”she testifies.
“We have an ecosystem that is bubbling”
Vegetal Signals uses its boxes to analyze the electrical activity of plants to understand the “stresses” they undergo (lack of water, disease, etc.). The company says it currently has only one competitor using this technology. “We have an ecosystem that is bustling, we have never seen so many innovations emerge”, observes Justine Lipuma, also a member of the La France digitale office. Although it is dynamic, agritech remains embryonic.
Since its creation in 2016, the association’s 120 start-up members have only created around 3,000 jobs. And their technologies are struggling to be massively implemented on farms. According to David Joulin, in ten years, France must have produced 1,500 technological innovations, but only between 10% and 12% of farmers have adopted at least one of them.
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