Dince the support that the Republic gave it in the 19e century, the model of the small family farm imposed itself in France as the “natural” form of agricultural activity. The latter, which still occupied a third of the active population in 1945, was massively organized according to this mode until the great modernization impulse of the 1960s. Despite the gigantic transformations of agriculture that have taken place since then, this family model a considerable weight in the imagination of the French and still permeates the vision of exploitation – maintained by professional agricultural organizations –, in particular when the question of the transmission of this from one generation to another is at stake. .
However, at a time when the share of farm managers only represents 1.5% of total employment, the classic scenario of the father of a family, supported throughout his life by his wife (at work long invisible) and possibly by his children, caregivers, passing on the farm to his son on his retirement (much more rarely to his daughter!), has lost much of its relevance. Half of the operators still in activity will leave by 2030, and only a third of them say they have a successor. This decline particularly affects livestock farming and coincides with the virtual disappearance of married farming: less than one out of five farm managers still works as a couple.
This agricultural model of conjugally shared family activity has had its day. This does not mean that French farms have lost all family character, often retained for heritage reasons, with no necessary link to a professional project. Alongside farm managers working alone or with employees, complex corporate forms and associations between farmers with no family ties, but sharing the same economic or agronomic ambition, emerge. Some use activity delegation, project management assistants or subcontractors.
While the number of employees hired directly on farms has increased little since the beginning of the 2010s, the number of employees of specialized companies working on a contract basis for farms is growing spectacularly. And this in particular in the sectors of viticulture, vegetable production and arable farming.
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Within farms, at the same time as corporate forms are gaining in power, statutes and professional practices are becoming more complex: thus, temporary or seasonal work, which in the past concerned work and unskilled workers, may today involve tasks of high technicality and high responsibility; an agricultural business manager can combine his self-employed activity with salaried activities carried out elsewhere; this same entrepreneur can delegate work on his farm to a service provider, etc.
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