Farm work at the centre

This page sets out the second of the two proposals I currently put forward. It is the twin of the first, Regenerative agriculture · Nutrient density · Metabolic health, and is both its complement and its condition. No deep transformation of French agriculture, whether towards regenerative practices, a serious link with metabolic health or nutrient-dense production, will hold at scale unless work is placed at the centre.

We talk a great deal about ecology and the environment when discussing how agriculture is changing, and that matters. We talk about the economics of supply chains, which is essential. We talk about agriculture's functions, food and energy, which are fundamental. But in debates increasingly polarised around the environment, we too often forget the person's values, the management of the business and its commercial strategy, the organisation of work and occupational health. Yet these dimensions are decisive in making farmers' situations more solid, happier and more prosperous, and in steering, supporting and achieving change. Demonstrating the technical and economic effectiveness of an innovation is necessary; it is not enough to actually change the situation of the many. There will be no change at scale unless these dimensions are at the heart of our concerns.

This proposal is in no way limited to grass-based livestock. It applies to every sector, each of which raises the question of work in its own way: diversified vegetable growing, which must reach an economically sustainable and liveable size; vineyards and orchards, which employ large numbers of salaried workers; arable crops, particularly those supplying industrial outlets.

The three steps of my argument

Work is not the only condition of attractiveness, and I want to say so clearly. There are at least two others, which I name without addressing them. The first is income: there is no lasting attractiveness without pay that matches the work done. Its determinants (prices, markets, value sharing, public policy) are not the subject of my studies; yet I know that no improvement in work will durably make up for insufficient income. The second is political, cultural and anthropological. As Raymond Ruyer pointed out, a society does not endure on its intellectuals and artists alone: it holds together because others, farmers, fishers, industrial workers, produce every day. Restoring the social, cultural and psychological standing of productive occupations, including in education, means changing a mindset that has taken hold since the 1960s in our families, our institutions and our value system. This may be the most demanding leap of all (see my post "Produire ou mourir ?", in French).

1. Three established fields, three genealogies

The farming world has three main sets of actors and schemes that deal with work. Each has its own genealogy, funding, professions and way of approaching the farmer. We can surely aim to connect these worlds better.

1.1 Advice, support and agricultural development: a mosaic of specialities

As we found in our study with Charles-Antoine Gagneur (Gagneur and Thiery, 2018, in French), and despite notable changes since (see my article "Accompagnement global des agriculteurs en 2025", in French), farm advice in France is still structured as a mosaic of specialities. Agronomy is the domain of the chambers of agriculture, technical institutes and cooperatives. For some twenty years it has been shaped by the "agroecological transition" and then by regenerative agriculture, notably the reduction of inputs (pesticides, fertilisers, water). Our study looked precisely at the skills and organisational forms of farmer support in this context. Management falls to accounting and management centres, land to the SAFER land agencies and notaries, legal matters to lawyers and farmers' unions. National agricultural and rural organisations (ONVAR) occupy valuable niches: relations between partners, farmer groups, machinery cooperatives (CUMA).

This field approaches the farmer as a business owner and producer. It delivers sound recommendations within each register, but they sometimes miss the integrated situation of the farmer, their partners, employees and family. Two well-known limits explain this.

a. A vertical, top-down, fragmented and specialised logic, where situations call for a global approach. Each speciality brings its expertise; no one is responsible for connecting them at the level of the farm and the farmer's project. The global approach to the farm is not a new idea: it has been formalised since the late 1970s (Osty, 1978; Marshall et al., 1994). But it remains hard to sustain in organisations structured by speciality and by funding line. Strategic advice on pesticide use recently illustrated this: in 2023 the CGAAER, the Ministry of Agriculture's general council for food, agriculture and rural areas, found that it was mostly perceived as an administrative constraint rather than a tool for transforming farming systems (CGAAER, 2023).

b. The human, psychological and organisational dimension handled at the end of the chain. It often comes in once the other logics have done their work and what is left over turns into a crisis. Yet it is not a residue: it is what allows the other logics to hold or to collapse.

Deep transformations are not purely technical; the shift to more autonomous, grass-based ruminant systems is one example. They recompose the work situation, the relationship to land, economic strategy, professional identity and often family and inheritance dynamics. They call for global support for the business: strategic over the medium term, but also centred on the entrepreneur's values and orientations, combining expert input with what comes from farmers themselves and their groups. The chambers of agriculture are moving in this direction: their strategic plan "Ambition 2030" provides for more human, personalised support throughout a career, and for referent advisers responsible for a global approach to farms (Chambres d'agriculture France, 2026). This is a very positive development.

Independent advice has also been growing in recent years, though still on a small scale: agronomists and consultants who sell neither inputs nor machinery, readily work with a global approach and start from the farmer's project. It points in the right direction, precisely because it addresses the two limits above.

1.2 Occupational health and safety: from compensation to quality of working life

The second field was built separately, around agricultural social protection, embodied in France by the MSA, the farmers' social security fund. It approaches farmers and employees as people exposed to risk. Its genealogy can be read in three layers that build up without replacing one another.

The first is compensation: workplace accidents, occupational diseases, musculoskeletal disorders. It remains very active, as injury rates in agriculture are still among the highest of any sector.

The second is prevention based on real activity. Driven by ergonomics and the sociology of work, it shifts attention from injury statistics to what people actually do: their trade-offs, their practical intelligence, their compromises with prescriptions. The MSA, the network of the national agency for the improvement of working conditions (ANACT) and its regional associations (ARACT), and the joint technology network on work in agriculture (now RMT TRACE) are its main vehicles. This approach through real activity has long been part of the MSA's doctrine, which chose not to stop at injury statistics but to carry prevention upstream. This is a very positive achievement, to be built upon.

The third is quality of working life, mental workload and distress. Combating distress is now coordinated at interministerial level and carried by a chain of local actors. But combating distress is not the same as producing well-being. The first task is about detection and care; the second is played out upstream, in the organisation of work.

That is where I want to go: producing quality of working life and meaning, not just compensating or preventing. And unlike advice, which addresses the business owner first, this field works for everyone active in farming, employees included. This is essential: farm employees, whether permanent, seasonal or employed by third parties, are a growing share of those who do farming, and a share that is still too little visible.

Musculoskeletal disorders, exhaustion and distress are not "health" problems layered on top of "technical" ones. They are indicators of how the work system functions as a whole. Ignoring them upstream of technical and economic decisions means finding them again downstream, in worse and costlier forms.

1.3 Employment and training: statuses, flows and pathways

The third field approaches the person as a worker: learner, future farmer, employee, jobseeker, relief worker. It is organised around statuses, qualifications and flows: guiding, training, recruiting, setting up.

It brings together many heterogeneous actors: agricultural education (agricultural high schools, apprenticeship and adult training centres, rural family schools); the Regions, which are responsible for vocational training and guidance; continuing-training funds, VIVEA for farm operators and the skills operator OCAPIAT for employees; joint and specialised employment bodies such as ANEFA and APECITA; France Travail, the national employment service; and those who organise shared employment: employers' groups, farm relief services, machinery cooperatives that employ staff, agricultural contractors.

This field is being reshaped. The French law on food and agricultural sovereignty and generational renewal in agriculture, enacted on 24 March 2025, provides for a national programme of guidance and discovery of "living-world" occupations, a target of a sharp increase in the number of learners by 2030, and a one-stop shop, France services agriculture, covering everything from setting up to handing over, piloted in 2026 and rolled out from 2027. In 2026 France Travail presented a national roadmap for agricultural employment. At the same time, continuing-training funding is under strain: VIVEA has had to ration its support and OCAPIAT has lowered its funding levels.

Recent sociological work invites a shift in this field on one essential point. Professor François Purseigle in particular proposes reasoning in terms of pathways rather than of setting up a farm. People enter the profession later, often after salaried work outside agriculture. Moves back and forth between employment and entrepreneurship are multiplying: today's employee may be tomorrow's partner. People from non-farming families are becoming a major issue, yet they remain poorly named and therefore barely visible. The AGRINOVO survey of new farmers points the same way and argues for abandoning categories that hide the diversity of trajectories.

This field's blind spot mirrors that of advice. It thinks in statuses and flows, rarely in real activity and organisation. Aurélien Allouche's study (Ressource) of salaried work in perennial crops in southern France shows this clearly: human-resources tools exist, but they are only taken up when they are carried by support close to farmers, who often see themselves as "farmers before employers" (Allouche, 2026).

2. Work, occupation, employment: an analytical grid

Here I follow the perspective proposed by Benoît Dedieu and Sophie Chauvat, drawing in particular on the work of the joint technology network on work in agriculture, now RMT TRACE (Dedieu and Chauvat, 2024). Behind the word "work", they explain, we speak in turn of real work, occupation and employment: three notions with different centres of gravity, often confused in the literature as in public schemes.

• Work refers, in the ergonomists' sense, to real activity: what, in carrying out the prescribed task, engages intelligence, creativity and health (Clot et al., 2000), as well as the organisation of who does what, when and where. This is the register of working conditions: hours, arduousness, health, meaning, skills, equipment.
• Occupation (métier) refers to a way of practising the profession (Lémery, 2003), with its values, norms and markers of what counts. From this perspective, the agroecological transition is a change of professional world, not just of practices.
• Employment refers to what gives rise to pay and a contract, as defined by the International Labour Office: statuses, working time, pay, precariousness, the labour market.

Some elements cut across all three notions, such as skills, know-how and autonomy. Above all, the authors show that the way these three notions account for what matters to workers lies at the heart of what makes occupations attractive. They also stress that connecting the pay attached to employment, conceptions of the occupation and the conditions of real work remains a challenge for those who carry each of these approaches.

This grid shows what each pillar captures and what it misses. Employment and training mostly capture employment. Health and safety mostly capture working conditions. Advice mostly captures the technical side of the occupation. None holds all three together. Attractiveness, however, requires them all: decent employment in exhausting work keeps no one; sustainable work in a devalued occupation attracts no one; a vocation without viable employment leads to early exits.

3. Work at the centre: a global analysis

This is where my proposal lies. The category that connects the three pillars is farm work, understood broadly. It includes the meaning of work, professional and territorial identity, the concrete organisation of activity and the technologies it uses, individual psychology, human relationships (family, employment, partnerships) and prosperity: entrepreneurial success, income, the quality of salaried employment, seasonal or not. It has precise theoretical grounding, drawn from the clinic of activity, the psychodynamics of work, ergonomics, the sociology of agricultural work and research on occupational identity.

It links three inseparable planes:

• what one does: real activity, its situated trade-offs, the knowledge, technologies and rules it draws on;
• who one is: professional and territorial identity, recognition, meaning;
• what one can do: the robustness of the system, the capacity to learn and anticipate, the power to act, which also depends on employment conditions, land and the legal form of the business.

Putting work at the centre changes the perspective, for advice as for steering the sector. Farmers are people, business owners or employees, and they are businesses. They are not adjustment variables in debates that are sometimes too ideological, focused solely on productive and environmental performance, essential as those are. An agriculture that works with and on living systems cannot be run by corporate, technological or technocratic logics alone: it needs people who can last.

In the most recent developments, three shifts follow for support.

a. Forms of business. A majority of farm business owners now operate through companies, sometimes several. The farm operator no longer plays one role but three: partner, sharing governance and a project; employer, recruiting, organising, managing and retaining staff; client, contracting out part of the work and needing to keep control of the system and its know-how. These three functions call on different skills and resources. They are also three distinct sources of tension and distress. Supporting them involves advice, employment and training, and occupational health at once.

b. Pathways. Describing real trajectories (late entries, career changes, moves from employee to partner, takeovers within or outside the family) is the condition for tailored support. A handover is not a mere succession: it is a new business project, which often requires restructuring prepared in advance, and which involves assets, land and relations between generations.

c. Salaried work. Permanent employees are the only category of agricultural workers to have grown over the last decade (Dedieu and Chauvat, 2024), and a growing share of the work is done by employees of employers' groups, machinery cooperatives or contractors. Aurélien Allouche's study shows that recruitment difficulties and the precariousness of salaried work reinforce each other, and that attractiveness is played out at several levels at once: the farm, the job, the sector, pay (Allouche, 2026). Putting work at the centre therefore also means thinking about employees' work and occupation in their own right: their conditions, their quality of working life, the meaning they find in it, their prospects, up to becoming a partner or setting up their own farm.

In practice, the global analysis of work I propose rests on a few proven principles: start from the person's situation and trajectory, not from predefined categories; have people tell their work rather than prescribe; hold together the technical, economic, land-related, organisational and human; and sequence action by increasing cost, starting with what the person can change themselves.

It relies on a change matrix with three components, developed in a note for Arvalis (Thiery, 2025): psychological capacity (motivation, acceptance), knowledge (information, understanding) and power to act, in Yves Clot's sense (skills in situation, framework for action: work organisation, resources, arduousness, mandate to act for an employee or a young partner). Different schemes act on different components.

Diagram 4 — The change matrix: three components, complementary schemes. At the level of the individual, excluding economic, regulatory and political levers. "—": not the scheme's primary function. After Thiery (2025).

Personalised support acts more strongly than institutional communication on psychological capacity and on the power to act; classic advice and "educational" communication mainly transmit knowledge. They do not replace one another: they complement each other.

4. Attractiveness: an outcome, not a campaign

Attractiveness is played out at several levels at once: the farm (working conditions, organisation, management), the job (collective agreements, pay, housing, prospects) and the sector (the image of agriculture, controversies, how the occupation is viewed). No pillar holds it alone. That is why it sits on the same line as work, as its horizon.

Occupation-discovery and communication campaigns are useful. But they can only bring people towards a job; they cannot keep them there. Retention, fewer early exits and successful handovers are decided in real work. An attractiveness policy that does not put work at the centre risks attracting people who will leave again.

5. Why this is decisive for regenerative agriculture

Transitions are often paid for in work. Very low-input management can meet its environmental goals while maintaining yields, but at the cost of a heavier workload concentrated in already busy periods. A system that does not hold up humanly does not spread, whatever its technical and economic results.

Without putting work at the centre, regenerative farming and grass-based livestock will remain a niche, a marketing label captured by large industrial players, or a militant project carried by a few pioneers. To avoid repeating what happened with organic farming and agroecology ("transitions" that never happen at scale and get bogged down in sterile ideological tensions), we must return to people and to work.

Scaling regenerative agriculture requires farmers and employees who are neither exhausted nor isolated; who have the psychological robustness to go through the uncertainty of any change of model; who earn a decent living; who have systemic agronomic knowledge without falling into dependence on new prescribers; who make their own technological choices; who have the economic, legal and land-related power to act on their orientations over time; and who find the right ways of organising their work, alone, with their partners or with their employees.

More broadly, generational renewal, like the scaling of regenerative agriculture, can be an opportunity to build an integrated framework around work, one that helps technical and economic schemes, health and quality-of-working-life schemes, and employment and training schemes connect better.

Work completed and under way on this axis

Each piece of work is linked to the pillars it connects.

Global analysis of work and pathways

• Adaptive multi-paddock grazing study (ongoing). A global approach to livestock farmers' practices and trajectories: technical, economic and commercial aspects, land, work organisation, professional and territorial identity, quality of working life. It belongs both to my first proposal and to this one.
• Study of the mobilisation potential of farmers in three catchments, for Eaux du Bassin Rennais (2021–2022, with SCE). A reading by trajectories and steering capacities rather than by profiles.

Advice × work

• Study on the conditions for deploying strategic support towards low-input agriculture (French Ministry of Agriculture, 2018, with C.-A. Gagneur; in French). Practices, tools and organisations of advice; advisers' skill needs.
• "Pédagogiser", incarner, engager (Arvalis, GRAMICIBLE project, PARSADA programme, 2025). Communicating from real work situations; change matrix: psychological capacity, knowledge, power to act.
• AGOR@GRI study (ACTA, CASDAR, 2020). Digital uses (private groups, social networks, online advice) in transition pathways, and the persistent preference for peer exchange.
• Sociological analysis of open-air burning practices (ADEME, 2025, with Ressource; public report, 1,901 farmers). Work organisation outweighs sociodemographic profile in explaining practices.

Health and safety × work

• Protecting operators against chemical pesticide risk (DREETS, DRAAF and ARS Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, regional occupational health plan PRST4, 2025). A grid integrating psychological dimensions and real work; the stance of a "curious investigator"; anticipation as a factor of robustness.
• How has CASDAR helped reduce arduous work in Breton vegetable farming? (ASIRPA-CASDAR evaluation, French Ministry of Agriculture, DGPE, 2026, consortium of Vertical Horizontal, Ressource and Parenthèse conseil). How a subject long considered "just the way it is" becomes speakable, then the object of tools and services.

Employment and training × work

• CASDAR's contribution to improving salaried working conditions in perennial crops in southern France (ASIRPA-CASDAR evaluation, French Ministry of Agriculture, DGPE, 2026, same consortium; study led by Aurélien Allouche, Ressource).
• Elements on arduous work. Vegetable growing, employers and employees (presentation to the French Ministry of Agriculture's employment working group, September 2026). Support sequenced by increasing cost.
• Study of the uses of rural leases (French Ministry of Agriculture, DGPE, 2025). The place of leases in business strategies, handovers and set-ups outside the family.

Training

• Training for water agency staff, with Christophe Buys (SCE, KERAN school): describing and modelling farmers' work situations and trajectories.