Veteran farmer and environmental campaigner, Andre Pochon, gives a personal account of the evolution of Breton farming over the past forty years.
I was born in 1931. At that time my parents farmed a large farm of forty hectares in St- Mayeux.
In addition to my parents, there were two farm workers, and my three older sisters also lent a hand with the farm work. The farm had four horses – for the ploughing – and for the times, was a large concern. When I was seven, the landlord who owned the farm died, and we were evicted by the new owner (such things were quite commonplace in those days). My parents found another farm, smaller than the first, just twenty-five hectares. They were keen for me to join them full-time on the farm, to help with the ploughing, and I left school at the first opportunity, when I was thirteen years old. It was just a few days after the Normandy Landings. When the war was over, I was given a chance to return to school, in Corlay, and resume my studies. I proved to be a much better student on my return than I had been before, and completed the four-year college course in just two years. At the end of it my teachers wanted me to go on to St-Brieuc to study to be a school teacher, but I refused, because by then I had decided that I wanted to be a farmer, like my parents.
I went back to working with my parents, and was also active in the Catholic Young Farmers group. This was a very progressive association which was trying to find ways to help farmers adapt to the changes that were taking place in agriculture. Many people who were active in this group in the 1950s went on to become prominent in national politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The overriding concern at that time was how to make the transition from horse power to tractor power, and the consensus of opinion was that this could only be done by amalgamating farms to make them bigger.
I was married in 1954, and my wife and I took on a nine-hectare farm, beside my parents’ farm, with the idea that the combined area of thirty-four hectares was sufficient to support the purchase of a tractor.
At the same time, I was part of a group of farmers who formed the C A for Corlay and Mûr -de-Bretagne. The aim of the group was to share experiences and improve farming methods, and we were introduced to the idea of feeding our milking cattle almost exclusively on forage, instead of having to grow supplementary crops, such as beet for them. The technique worked well on my farm, giving a big increase in yield, and allowing me to keep three cows per hectare, instead of the usual one cow per hectare. The plan that had been put to me by the experts was to sow a mixture of rye grass and white clover, and to rotate my cattle from one paddock to the next throughout the year. After moving the cows on from the paddock, I was to apply nitrogen fertiliser to stimulate the regrowth of the pasture, which I did. However, I had an uncle who sowed the same seed mixture, but who did not apply the fertiliser, and I noticed that his fields looked in better condition than mine. Closer inspection showed that the clover was doing well in his field, but not in mine. I stopped using the nitrogen fertiliser, and the clover returned to health, and overall yield increased. These findings were reported back to the experts, who conducted trials, etc. which confirmed my findings, and eventually a nitrogen-free system of animal husbandry was adopted by many farmers across Brittany, and other parts of France. My discovery made me quite well-known in farming circles.
My wife and I moved to a larger farm, in St Bihy near Quintin. I believed that I had proven that it was possible for a farmer in Brittany to make a good living on a nine-hectare farm, but we wanted to own land, and the authorities at that time were insisting on the need to make farms bigger, and refused to let us buy less than twenty-five hectares!
We continued farming with the same methods: we kept cows which we milked, the cream, and butter, which we made, was sold, and the skimmed milk was fed to our pigs, which were kept on straw. The pig manure mixed with straw was good for the ground. It was a sustainable system of farming which produced food for sale, and kept plenty of people in the countryside.
In my opinion, it all went wrong in the 1970s and 1980s; the Common Agricultural Policy guaranteed fixed prices for farm produce, considerably higher than the world prices. Imported foods were subject to import tariffs so that they could not compete with European-produced food. However, soya beans, and some cereal derivatives were exempt from the tariffs; they could be imported, and then used to make animal feed, which could be combined with locally-grown maize to make a complete food. Animals raised on this cheap food could be sold at the protected high local prices, meaning that farmers could make huge profits, limited only by the number of animal sheds they could build, and how much feed their animals could consume. This has brought us to the position that we are in today.
When I was a young man, things were different in the countryside: farms were small, families were large, there were farm workers on most farms, in addition to the family itself, there were young people everywhere, and there was always a lot going on. In terms of money, we may have been poor, but life was good. I believe that in spite of all the changes, it is still possible for a young person to make a good living in the Breton countryside, either by keeping a small dairy farm, as I did, or pigs, or by having a market garden, and selling produce on the market.
What is the best size for a farm in Brittany?
In the 1930s, when André Pochon was born, Breton agriculture was going through a difficult time. The whole of Europe was in the grip of a depression, and the price that could be got for farm produce was in steady decline – but costs, most notably rents, were fixed, or even increasing.
Perversely, the war brought a temporary respite to agricultural problems, but once the occupying German forces had been expelled, farmers were once again faced with the dilemma of how to make their farms pay. The answer seemed to be mechanisation: tractors were easier to run than horses, because you did not have to give over part of your farm to growing oats to feed them. The downside was that, in the 1950s, it was found that the tractor had to be working for at least 800 hours per year in order to pay for itself, which meant that there was not enough work to keep it occupied on a traditional-sized farm. Farms had to be amalgamated in order to be viable. This meant fewer farms, fewer people in the countryside, less business for local tradesmen, a loss of community spirit, and life in the countryside becoming less fun.
The new, larger farms were kept in business because the Common Market kept food prices high by imposing import tariffs on goods coming in from overseas; even so, farmers continued to feel under financial pressure: they increased the size of their farms, bought bigger tractors and more machinery, and eventually had to invest in intensive animal production. Farms still only remained viable through subsidies and price support, and are essentially no more able to pay their way today than they were sixty years ago. The current ‘hope’ is that multinational corporations will invest in food processing plants in Brittany which will take produce off the Breton farms at a guaranteed price that would allow them to meet all their expenses – but if this were to happen it would be going against a trend established over at least three generations. People say that farmers are in this predicament, because the general public will not pay a fair price for its food. But this presupposes that the general public has got money to spend on better food.
The last time that Breton farms were truly profitable would appear to be before the French Revolution, before they had to pay rent, and before they were forced to sell produce on the open market – at that time the average farm size was probably just a few acres at most.
