The Agricultural Show, which opens its doors on Saturday February 24, is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. But the idea of honoring the agricultural world goes back even further, with the creation of the General Agricultural Competition in 1870. Since that date, the primary sector has largely metamorphosed.
In 1860, agriculture employed more than one in two workers in France. What was still called the peasantry even concerned an even larger part of the population, because the women and children asked to work the land did not always appear in the statistics.
On the eve of the Second World War, the proportion fell to one in four, before plummeting in the second half of the 20th century.e century and fall below 2%. And the decline continues: between 2010 and 2020, France lost nearly 100,000 farmers and as many farms (or 20% of the total).
An increase in surface area
The decline in the agricultural population was accompanied by a concentration of land, with the absorption of small farms by larger ones.
This phenomenon has mechanically led to an increase in surface areas. A farm in mainland France today covers an average of 69 hectares, compared to 14 hectares in 1955.
This phenomenon has a double consequence on the functioning of the agricultural world:
- firstly, these large farms massively receive aid from the Common Agricultural Policy – the current system pays based on surface area – which further widens the gap between large and small farms;
- large farms employing half as many people as small ones (2.4 people compared to 4.8 on average), according to a report from the NGO Friends of the Earth, published in 2023this mechanism puts a further strain on agricultural demography.
However, workforce renewal constitutes one of the sector’s urgent needs: a quarter of farmers are over 60 years old, and one in two operators is expected to retire by 2030.