The Grass Is Greener in France

Graham Savage is kneeling in damp straw with a newborn lamb in his arms, its fleece still slick with yellow afterbirth. “When you’ve done 500 of these day and night over six weeks, you’re tired, believe me,” he grins. There’s a touch of Dorset in his vowels, as there is in the lush green meadows that roll toward tree-studded hillcrests outside the shed, yet we’re a long way from the English West Country. Just 50 km to the south, Max Cusell is herding his black-and-white Friesians out to pasture through thick mud. The surrounding valley has nothing in common with the flatlands of the Netherlands, but Cusell calls out to his cattle in his native Dutch. Here in the Limousin region, deep in central France, a new European agriculture is taking root. As local French abandon the countryside for the cities, farmers from elsewhere in the E.U. are eagerly filling the places left vacant.

Farming and the countryside still occupy a special place in the French psyche. When the annual agriculture trade show was held in Paris in February and March, 600,000 visitors — including no fewer than 11 presidential candidates — flocked to admire the livestock on display. France is still Europe’s leading producer, accounting for 23% of the E.U.’s agricultural output, and farmland still covers 51% of the country, but French farming faces an uncertain future. Between 1988 and 2000, more than a third of the country’s farms disappeared. Today, farmers and their dependents account for just 3.5% of the population, down from 12% in 1970. The decline has been particularly dramatic in isolated rural regions like Limousin, where the farming community has shrunk by 40% in the past 12 years.

Despite its diminished appeal to the French, farming in France has begun to look very attractive to some European neighbors. “Whenever a farm comes onto the market round here, if a French farmer’s not interested it’s immediately snapped up by a Dutchman or an Englishman,” Cusell explains. Because land is cheaper, commodity prices are higher and young farmers are helped by state-funded programs, many non-French figure France offers a better chance at success.

The aid programs have existed since the early 1960s and offer lump sum payments plus preferential loans to farmers aged 35 and under. And though their numbers are dwindling, farmers in France still receive the biggest chunk of the E.U.’s 140 billion Common Agricultural Policy budget each year — one reason why presidential candidates Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin are both so adamantly opposed to any reform of the ruinously expensive system. For dairy farmers from the Netherlands, where milk production has already hit the ceiling imposed by E.U. quotas, moving to an underpopulated area like Limousin provides an opening denied them at home. For farmers from the U.K., where farm incomes have dropped by 75% over the past decade, it’s a means of escaping the strong pound that makes their exports uncompetitive. “This country has given us a chance to farm in our own right in a way we’d never have been able to in Britain,” says Graham Savage.

Today, he and his wife Susan graze 700 sheep on 140 hectares of Limousin pasture and grow sunflower, wheat and barley on 70 hectares of arable land. “I saw an ad in the paper about how France had opened up its young farmer aid program to all E.U. citizens and just thought, ‘Why not?'” he remembers. “The French system gives you much more protection as a tenant, there’s an availability of farmland and if you do want to buy, property prices are so much lower.”

Max Cusell’s story is similar to his British neighbor’s. “Starting a farm had been my dream ever since I was a kid, but Holland’s so small that it’s very hard to find the land,” he says. “Coming to France was the only way for me to do it.” Working with his son Elbert, Cusell keeps a

55-strong dairy herd and raises pigs on 80 hectares of leased land. “That’s just not possible in Holland,” he explains. “You have to buy there, and the market’s saturated.” Constraints like that have led at least 14 foreign farmers to settle in Limousin over the past three years. “We’ve always been considered as farmers rather than foreigners, and we’ve never had any problems,” Cusell explains.

Nevertheless, France isn’t the promised land for every foreign hopeful. “There are as many failures as there are successes,” says Savage. “Commodity prices have come down, and small farms just aren’t viable anymore. If you haven’t got enough capital, it’s very hard indeed.” The same pressures that are hurting small farmers everywhere — global competition, the rise of large industrial farms and increased specialization — have hit France too. While the country’s farming population has declined, its farms have grown bigger. Nowadays an average holding measures 42 hectares, twice what it was 12 years ago. “The trend is for people to group together,” says Elbert Cusell, 33. “Grouping together means being able to take a weekend off now and then.” Max and Elbert work their holding as a farming cooperative; over half France’s agricultural land is now managed by corporate entities rather than individuals.

Even when the economic hurdles have been jumped, linguistics can still be a barrier for Limousin’s foreign settlers. “If you can’t cope with the language, there’s no way you’re going to integrate,” says Graham Savage. Indeed, the Cusell and Savage households are strikingly multilingual. “My brother and I speak French to each other, but as soon as we come into our parents’ house we start speaking Dutch,” says Elbert, who has lived in France since he was 11. The Savage children arrived here younger, and so for them their parents’ native English is more remote. “We speak to them in English, and they answer in French,” says Susan Savage. “They tell us they feel more French than English.” Though they’ve lived in France for almost 20 years, that’s not yet true of the elder Savages. “We’re happy being British and European,” says Susan, although she’s unhappy at not being able to vote. “We’ve been here a long time, and we pay our taxes.” It’s the same story up the road at the Cusell residence. “You never entirely adapt,” says Max. Indeed, some Gallic habits remain exotic to the northern Europeans. “In Holland, if you demonstrated too much it would give the farming profession a bad name,” Max continues. “But here in France, every profession defends its interests by taking to the streets. And it seems to work.” He pauses, then adds: “Perhaps people put up with too much in other countries.” Rural France may be becoming more European, but its new inhabitants are becoming a little bit French in the process.