The year is 1972: the Bertrand dairy farm, in Haute-Savoie, is operated by three single brothers, and their old father is broken in two by a life of work. We tirelessly mow the meadows by hand to feed the 100 head of cattle, we break up the stones to make the slab for the future stable, a novelty in the region. No women, no vacations, no leisure. Making Reblochon, the local specialty, requires daily labor.
In 1997, due to a lack of direct heirs, Patrick, a nephew, and his wife, Hélène, took over the business. Tractors, trailers, machines appear. Hélène sometimes takes a day off during which she” bored “. Fifty years later, in 2022, the family chooses to invest in milking robots, so as not to have to “employ people”explains Marc, the son of Hélène and Patrick, who refuses to become “manager” like many farmers now.
His partner, Alex, does not come from the agricultural world; he was a metalworker. Conversely, the wives of the two men do not work on the farm, but in town. Of their children, Marc and Alex say “that they will do what they want”…Transmitting the farm will not be an easy task, especially since land and real estate pressure is being felt hard. About thirty kilometers from Geneva, “it’s building all the time”, deplores Marc. How can we preserve agricultural land and the profession in these conditions?
This family story which spans half a century, told by Gilles Perret in the documentary The Bertrand Farmreleased on January 31, traces a large part of the developments in the French rural world in recent times. The agricultural bill examined in the National Assembly since Tuesday May 14, in addition to intending to respond in part to the anger expressed at the start of the year, aims to draw some lessons from the transformations that have been taking place over the past fifty years. A world that has experienced upheaval “fairly new” on a historical scale, according to Thierry Pouch, economist and researcher at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, and of which the demographic collapse is undoubtedly the most obvious manifestation.
A painful paradox: despite his essential role, recognized and praised by all, that of feeding his fellow human beings, the farmer is now almost invisible. Since 1982, in just over forty years, agricultural employment has been divided by three: it represented 7.5% of total employment in 1982, it would be 2.7% in 2022, according to data published by INSEE. Operating farmers are even fewer in number: they represented 1.6% of people in employment in 2022. This is not only the socio-professional category which has declined most sharply over the recent period, but is now also the least represented, in a France where employees and intermediate professions are the majority.
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