Who are the “slasher-gatherers” who alternate between Teams meetings in the morning and zucchini harvesting in the afternoon?

UOnce you’ve got back into the office routine, you sometimes feel like a tomato plant in need of photosynthesis. What you miss, even vaguely, is not so much the idleness and the 4pm spritz as the contact with nature, that feeling of being part of a vibrant whole that air-conditioned universes sometimes make difficult to experience. You then like to dream, telling yourself that you’d love to get into market gardening or goat farming. But, for fear of giving up your cozy permanent job, you end up quickly redirecting your nourishing concerns to the canteen (in any case, it’s too short to hope to grow a parsnip by 12:45).

Life in the tertiary sector is based on a cardinal abstraction of the relationship to subsistence: while we work to earn our living (metaphorically, of course), we delegate to others the care of taking care of the concrete means of keeping our physiological variables afloat. This division of tasks is now being challenged by a certain number of young workers. They want both the 11 a.m. videoconference (to find out which wallpaper Martin has chosen) and to pick the 5 p.m. zucchini (because it is good to know what we are eating: “Tonight, organic ratatouille!”).

A site launched in 2024, which lists and encourages this type of experience, has found a charming terminology to describe these emerging profiles: “slasher-gatherers”. A reference to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and to slashers, who exercise several professional activities at the same time. Adept at hybrid planning, slasher-gatherers have the particularity of having one foot in the fields, one foot in the tertiary sector. They are market gardeners/bankers; winegrowers/strategy consultants; breeders/freelance writers…

Chicken farmer and web editor

As he recently explained it to Parisianit was by noting that many farmers have a parallel activity that Julien Maudet, a young polytechnician working in consulting and investing part of the week in a cider-making project, had the idea, with Nicolas Baleynaud and Lola Dubois, of encouraging the opposite approach by launching the site Slashers-gatherers.fr. Objective: to help tertiary sector workers to embrace an agricultural activity by offering them resources (training suggestions, design of a hybrid professional project, etc.) and by highlighting the experience of those who have tried it.

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Like Cécile Cardeillac, a breeder of laying hens in Gers and a web editor working remotely. Is your website falling apart? Let me write your content! (Guaranteed to be free of typos) »she suggests, with humor, on his LinkedIn profile. Here, the service activity helps to cushion the shocks inherent in breeding, such as when bird flu comes to weigh down the livestock, and to moderate an agricultural activity that is sometimes hard and unprofitable. As for the 600 laying hens, they require a care that invites us to put into perspective the artificial emergencies of our digital worlds: “It’s the living”says Cécile, as if to sum up a need to re-anchor oneself.

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