La France Agricole celebrated its 4,000th issue!

Agricultural France celebrated its 4,000^e number !

On March 22, 2023, Agricultural France published its 4.000^e number. The first issue dates from June 9, 1945.

Here is how the editorial staff opened their special notebook:

4000 NUMBERS AT YOUR SIDE

Coming out of the war. on June 9, 1945, a group of farmers and investors launched the first issue of Agricultural France. The country is hungry, we must produce! Succeeding in this challenge requires the dissemination of reliable and independent information. A leitmotiv from which your newspaper has never departed over time and changes in shareholders. 4,000 numbers and a digital transformation later, the fundamentals are still there. “When I was a minister, I read Agricultural France, says Philipe Vasseur (…). She had this character of independence which sometimes caused some teeth to cringe. Agricultural France was nobody’s spokesperson.“We are the guarantors of this heritage… »

I was born a few years later – not in a cabbage… it was a stork that brought me. It was 14 or 15 quintals of wheat per hectare (I mightn’t find the exact figure, and that allows me to maintain a bit of mystery regarding my age).

I integrated what was then theNational School of Agronomics of Montpellier (ENSANOW Institut Agro Montpellier) to 34 quintals/hectare.

It was more or less the time when, thanks to the efforts of the agricultural profession in the broad sense, to research and development and to a proactive agricultural policy, France became self-sufficient.

And I became an avid reader of The France Agricultural.

I can say, with a bit of irony, however bitter, that I quickly ” bifurcated » towards a field of activity where agronomy was for me in the background; nothing out of the ordinary: agricultural education, with its great variety, leads to many fields.

I have remained an avid reader of Agricultural France.

I retired at 72 quintals/hectare.

In wheat, yields are stagnating. They are restrained by various factors, some linked to policies that we are reluctant to revise despite the pressing, implicit calls of the new global geopolitical and geostrategic deal; urgent calls that add to the fact that one in eight people still do not eat enough or in a nutritionally satisfactory way in the world. Yet it is quite rightly that the letter to the reader of this issue 4000 – by Mr. Henri Bonnet (Charente-Maritime) – is entitled: “ You have to produce ».

And I’m still an avid reader of Agricultural France. I even happened to contribute drive letters.

Two of my grandsons are also interested in it and thus acquire a vision of the real world which it is urgent to propagate more, in the face of the avalanche of misinformation.

Number following number, Agricultural France works on it.

Here, in conclusion, is the editorial by Mr. Yvon Herry, managing editor:

« The great (r)evolution

“When you don’t know where you’re going, look where you come from“says an African proverb. If farmers do not always know what the future holds ⁽¹⁾, they can look back on the long road traveled since the end of the Second World War and find that they have accomplished a phenomenal evolution. Not to say a real revolution. 1945, it is also on this date that Agricultural France was created. On the occasion of this number 4000, we therefore wanted to retrace the vast changes that have taken place in our sector and this, in all areas (…).

In 1955, during the first agricultural census, France had 2.3 million farms. In 2020, there are only 389,000 left. And yet, the much larger French population is much better fed and our agriculture exports. In the meantime, technical and genetic progress has been dazzling. An example: in France, the yield of common wheat has gone from 35 q/ha in the 1970s to 70-80 q/ha today. Comparable progress for milk. Plant breeding techniques have in fact greatly evolved, just like in the animal sector with the arrival of genomics. Advances have also been very significant in the field of machinery, with the arrival of precision agriculture in crops and robotization in livestock farming, which has made it possible to reduce on-call duty. Over time, society has increased its requirements both for the use of phyto products and for animal welfare, while organic has developed.

On the European side, the establishment of the common agricultural policy in the early 1960s largely contributed to the modernization of the agricultural sector, but also to its restructuring. After many changes, it has become complex and restrictive. France is now working on a new orientation law (…) to ensure the renewal of generations. Philippe Vasseur, former Minister of Agriculture, also proposes a pact between the nation and the farmers (…), with in the first place, “the need to better remunerate producers, on whom the country’s food sovereignty depends“. Which is a matter of common sense.

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⁽¹⁾ In Agricultural France number 3987 of last December 23, we published a dossier on “What awaits you in five years“.