2023-08-04 16:34:31
Vegetable picking is in full swing, but customers are missing. If the drop in demand for direct sales during the summer break is usual, it is felt more strongly this year.
According to the market gardeners contacted by the RTS, it happens that more than half of the vegetables of the week do not find takers. On the one hand, restaurants and grocery stores are closing for the summer. “We went from several orders per week to 0”, testifies Jérôme Nidegger, who manages the Champignons de Cartigny (GE)
On the other, individuals are going on holiday more than usual, it seems. There would be a desire to make up for lost trips due to Covid-19, imagine the market gardeners. The demand for vegetable baskets therefore drops drastically.
A reality that contrasts with the abundance of fields, notes Jonas Gavillet, micro-farmer in the canton of Fribourg. “It’s a difficult time in the market gardening industry, because we see all these beautiful products that we have to put in second choice, in action, even in the compost”, he explains Friday in La Matinale.
Anti-waste strategies
The anti-waste operation is therefore launched. On social networks, calls to come and buy large quantities of vegetables are circulating. The prices are broken. Some professionals go so far as to give away the fruit of their labor. These strategies aim to avoid throwing away the products, but they jeopardize the guarantee of a salary at the end of the month.
It is then necessary to find solutions to hold on in the long term. At the Racine Carrée micro-farm in Prez-vers-Noréaz (FR), Jonas Gavillet now only delivers to restaurants that are open all year round.
“I only produce from April to November. I had to find a clientele who might adapt to that, he explains. For example, I targeted the restaurants in Bulle rather than Friborg because the attendance is not the same in summer.
He also put conditions on the subscription for vegetable baskets. It is not possible to cancel the baskets during the summer holidays, but simply to shift them to another week.
Another option is to stagger production to limit harvests during the summer. For example, by planting the tomatoes later, so that the bulk of the picking is done at the end of August. But this method is at risk because it goes once morest the natural development of plants, underlines the ProConseil service, which accompanies new agricultural structures.
Product processing is expensive
To add value to neglected fresh vegetables, processing allows them to be sold in canned or soup form. But this option is difficult to access for small farms, explains Eline Müller, union secretary at Uniterre. “As a lot of hygiene standards have to be respected to process the products, it requires a lot of investment. (…) We have a food price on the stalls that does not at all reflect production prices and transformation.”
Bastien, market gardener at the Ortie micro-farm in Geneva, also denounces the lack of suitable processing sites: “We have to send Geneva pearl barley to Bern to have it husked, because it’s only there – low that there is a machine. The means of production on our scale are lacking, he laments in the Morning of the RTS. We would need kitchens where we might come to do our transformation at a lower cost, because this n It is not possible for small peasant structures like ours to invest a lot in premises that would allow us to manage this surplus.”
However, there is a cannery in Geneva. Le Cri de la Carotte opened a year ago. But its manager Emma Azconegui is already under water. She says she works without interruption to be able to process the hundreds of kilos of vegetables that arrive regularly.
The horizon therefore seems blocked for micro-farms. Especially since demand is not only down in summer. Since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers have turned away from short circuits. Subscriptions to vegetable baskets, for example, are on the decline. Customers are even fewer than before the pandemic.
>> Also listen to the interview with Hélène Bougouin, agronomist at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), in the 12:30 p.m.: The summer trough particularly painful this year for small market gardening farms: interview with Hélène Bougouin / 12:30 p.m. / 4 mins. / today at 12:33
Anouk Pernet/vajo
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