"There are 2 reasons of the success of the production" "First, there's the water" "It takes water to produce a plant" "And it takes a certain heat at a certain time" "Because when it's too cold, it doesn't produce" "And I think that people accustomed to the fact that everything is easy" "That climates are normal, that everything succeeds and that agricultural products are hugely abundant" "That there is no problem" "So, these last years, there were some problems around us" "For example, Russians had very bad harvests, 2 or 3 years" "So they bought agricultural products from the outside" "So we said that the sovietic system wasn't able to produce the food that is necessary to its citizens" "Perhaps we spoke too fast, because in the end they had climatical problems" "Further from us, some years ago and it continues" "The great drought that rages in the Sahel" "Where it's much more disastrous, because people are starving" "So people lost the idea that there could be this kind of problems" "And this year, we are right in it" "So it becomes reality with a very stupid thing, there was no patatoes this year" "People were searching potatoes, while just one year ago, potatoes were sold 50 old francs per kilo" "Nobody wanted them, we didn't what to fuck with potatoes" "And this year, there was no potatoes, it was a disaster!" "And for 500 francs per kilo, everbody ran to get some" "So it proves that there is this kind of problems" "And farmers as people, I mean, consumers" "We were used to think that we dominate everything" "And that by intensifying, with a fertilizer for example" "We would have very adundant harvests, we'd have abundance permanently" "Well, this year, we put on fertilizer as usual, it means quite a lot" "We didn't even harvest a quarter of what we usually harvest" "If it continues, we don't even know if cows will be maintained this year" "So I think that's an issue that people and farmers should think about" "Because all these techniques which are based on intensification may be quite good" "But we realize that the present form of agriculture, very technicized, very intensified" "As soon as we come across a climatic incident, like this year" "We don't have the means to address it" "Does an high technology make us relatively more dependent on climate?" "We're not dependent on climate" "But because of the high technology, because we apply much more fertilizer" "All these elements can't be valued and work, only if there's the necessary condition" "And the necessary condition is water" "And it's not only the water, it's a certain temperature at a certain time" "When you say that it's water, it's water of the sky?" "Or you suppose that, by a miracle of the State, there would be irrigation system everywhere?" "Well, that's obvious." "Actually, there are people that considered irrigating systematically" "It means watering when necessary, but there are 2 problems" "Some spoke about generating rain" "It's very nice, but to irrigate, it needs water" "If a drought ever continues like this year" "Everybody says that the rivers and even watercourses is very low" "In the same time, water reserves are being depleted" "As for generating rains by artificial techniques" "Perhaps it's possible, I don't know the techniques it needs" "Anyway, it would require very expensive means" "So even if we could do it experimentally, we couldn't multiply infinitely" "So I think that famers should think about it in their techniques" "And then, we shouldn't waste the soil" "It means that with the intensification, with the very advanced techniques, farmers as consumers ended up thinking that" "A minimum of soil must be selected, intensified to the full and it will be enough to feed people" "Well, after all, I think these are quite false ideas" "Because there isn't just us to feed, but also the entire world" "But, even just for us, these ideas seems quite false" "But there's a second thing" "The fact that it's not obvious that people's food is assured" "Contrary to what people thought" "Maybe we must choice" "If we consider that it's an essential need" "Perhaps we must ensure that there are reserves, take precautions" "All that supposes a choice from the people" "To know if they want to meet these essential needs, and it will inevitably cost" "Or if they want to sacrifice them to the consumer society, for example" "Or even to sacrifice them to other stuff, less obvious for people, but more obvious for leaders" "For example, when we see that the people's subsistence is not assured" "When we see all the expenses for the armament, it sounds a bit stupid" "I think that the fact that the essential needs are not met, that there are climatic problems that are calling them into question" "That should make people think" "There are imperative choices for society" "There should be a conscience that develops about that" "And I think that we are seeing it, this years" "In your job, in your production, which essential needs do you think you fulfil, even badly?" "And then, what are those you don't fulfil at all?" "are there some that you don't fulfil at all?" "Are there essential needs whose the manner you are forced to produce, i.e. quickly, doesn't satisfy at all?" "What do you sacrifice?" "In the work?" "In total, at the end of the year, what do you feel like you've sacrificed?" "That's hard to say" "Do you have the feeling of sacrifice in your day?" "I have no feeling of sacrifice, in the sense that I don't think that I do public charity" "Nor that I sacrifice myself to feed people" "Don't you have a feeling of slavery either?" "Yes, there's a bit of that" "I think it's shared by many farmers" "We don't think that people see all the trouble, all the worry and all the stress there are to produce food" "While food is still a necessary thing" "People are too comfortable with abundance" "They don't see that abudance requires a whole bunch of stuff" "If you shall sum up your day, as we could ask to a Renault worker to sum up his 8 hours' work 3/4 would do a certain kind of moves" "If we ask you to sum up in gestures, what would your hand do?" "Would it only do that?" "or would it do other gestures?" "I think it's here there is the great difficulty" "May I ask you to show with your what kind of gestures you do?" "You have the soil, the tractor, the cows, what have you got?" "that's what kind of gestures?" "Can you try to do it with your hand without the objects?" "Maybe I'm not very gifted for some things..." "I begin my day by milking cows" "So cows are as that" "I wash them, I flank the sleeves and I start like this" "That's the first thing" "Then, in they day of a farmer like me, a breeder, there's always cleaning duties" "Some wheelbarrow of manure to go out, the pigsty to clean, etc." "So I take the fork, I tip it over" "Maybe take the waterjet to clean the milking parlour, because I have to do the washing-up" "These are all the gestures relative to the entry-level job, so to speak" "And then, I'll go through" "So I ride on the tractor, then gestures are comparable to a truck driver" "But more repetitive" "Because when we plough, at the end of the line, we have to change gear, reverse and restart" "There's the deck lift lever, the plough" "I have a fairly disgusting field with lots of rocks, so when I plough, I break many things" "So I stop this truck driver job and I turn off the ignition" "Because the base of the plough broke" "I unbolt all that stuff, the plough broke, I turn it" "I don't invent it!" "It happens almost daily when I work outside" "I go back to the house" "Ploughing is nice, but I have to weld as much as ploughing" "Because ploughs break often and if I couldn't use a welding machine to repair it, I wouldn't work" "That wouldn't be possible to run to the artisan" "I weld or, if necessary, I forge for something" "This is roughly how it happens" "Sometimes there are things to load, fertilizer bags or food bags" "Sometimes I also load manure on trailers" "I do the docker" "So well, the day will happen like this." "Winter there will be handlings" "And it's also possible that there are things to settle at home" "An engine mucks around..." "I must do the electrician" "This is roughly how it happens" "There are things that are repeated in the day" "But in the year, there will be a succession" "For example, when I'll sow, I'll care about the seeder" "I'll have to settle the seeder in a way that it puts enough seeds but not too much" "For example, when I sow maize, like in this field" "It doesn't show, but I can tell you that 250,000 seeds have been sowed in this field" "Y a 2 hectares et demi, on a semé 50 000 pieds à l'hectare" "I put 250,000, because we buy doses like this" "But tu put 250,000 seeds in 2.5 hectares, I had to work" "I had to understand what the guy who made the seeder explained on his instructions" "Because that's whole bunch of gears..." "That's not very intellectual, but it requires to understand what the guy tried to make you understand" "If you can't understand it, your seedling will be shitty" "And that requires other skills" "And then, when I'll have sowed and fertilized, I'll care about adjusting tensioners" "Then, during the year, the seedling will be done" "Maybe I will have to fertilize, do things like that, till the harvesting" "And I'll have the same thing, adjusment of the tools, etc." "All in all, my day will be diverse, tasks are not..." "If you compare with a semiskilled worker, I think that they bawl about that and they're right" "We speak about fragmentation of work which is very painful for people" "And that's perhaps the greatest interest of our job, we don't fragment the work" "We take stuff from A to Z" "When we produce a plant, we create it from the birth, from the insemination, the seedling" "And we will follow this plant until the harvesting" "And the livestock production is the same" "When we make a cow inseminate, we make it cover by a bull" "But then, we're always afraid that the cow isn't filled the first time" "That we'll have to make it breed, or that we don't see its heat" "So finally our task is not fragmented" "I think that's why there are still farmers" "Because they refuse intuitively the specialization" "Specialization which inversely assure them a higher stending than that of farmer" "Do you consider you more as a farmer or as countryman-peasant of another kind of factory?" "Well, that's very hard to answer this question" "Considering the carrying out, we're quite self-managers" "But above the carrying out, finally, we feel too much the weight of the economic forces" "To say we're really free and self-managers" "In other words, that's one of the charms of the job, we feel reponsible of what we do" "We feel we have a higher personal involvement" "That's rather the difference between guys who made the WWI and one who were on the maquis" "On the maquis, they choosed their actions, that was very funny" "While during WWI, they died for the France, at Verdun, by being crushed" "What do that we don't really feel free is that we're too dependent on the economic environment" "That's quite hard to explain, but that's it" "Here you described a lot of gestures that you do all along the line" "Don't you think there are other things than the hand?" "For example, the ear and the sight" "You don't hear the same thing than in a factory, but nevertheless you're very listening" "And your gaze is not riveted on what your hand does" "In your factory, what do you do?" "That's sure that the work of farmer is linked to the observation" "And an observation which is much more large than one of the boy who do is fragmented work on a little piece" "He has to care about 2 or 3 things" "While a breeder, when he is in the middle of a herd of cows" "Some have a better eye than others to see how is this herd" "Some have flair..." "A herd that is better than another one, what does it depend on?" "In the current system, the better herd is one which has the better productivity" "Actually, we could find other criteria" "But we are under this system of production" "For example, cows which make regularly good calves, which have more milk than others" "Actually, that's the better herd" "It's subject to a lot of factors" "Even a cow wanting bulls or not" "There are cows which don't show much that they want bulls" "And productivity drive us to use purebred bulls, i.e. to use insemination" "We're not like people who had just one bull in a herd" "We must have a watchful eye" "Can you teach a cow to want the bull?" "Yes, we can teach them, with a healthy dose of phosphorus" "They will probably be hotter than if they have been demineralized" "You can arouse them with vitamines, phosphorus..." "HEY YOU SPECTATOR MAYBE YOU ARE FED UP BECAUSE THE SPEAKER TALK TOO MUCH" "That's precisely here that nose and eye play a part" "DON'T FORGET HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH" "But eye, if you compare with a line worker" "The guy know he has to look after 3 or 4 points" "For us, it's clearly larger" "Do you still feel on a line?" "No, I indisputably don't feel on a line concerning the carrying-out" "But I feel on an economical line and that pisses me off" "And in the end of your days or months, there are other gestures that you do" "You phone" "And then, your voice which doesn't speak during the day says hallo to the Crédit agricole" "There is that" "We must have a minimum of contact with people" "And at that point, we become a kind company director, what bothers me deeply" "Because we bored farmers with "you're much better than workers because you are directors"" "And all the phraseology of the establishment, of the professional organization was based all on that" "That irritates me, because a company director must have some room for manoeuvre" "Even apart from the agriculture, that's very rare that a company director continues to produce when he's not assured to sell above its cost" "Cost, it means remuneration of the work" "Well, technically, it's impossible, because as he employs workers, he must respect social laws" "While 99% of French farmers, who are their boss and their employee at once" "And produce, this room of manoeuvre that the company director has, we haven't got it" "On the contrary, we are much more dependent on our environment" "That's why it bothers me, because we are not company directors" "But we even have to do the gestures of the company director" "If only to establish a treasury that serves to invest" "For example, when we need a tractor, most of time we don't have cash" "Actually, we have to go to the Crédit agricole to say them "I need a tractor that costs 5,000 francs, what could you lend me?"" "We won't go to the Crédit agricole and say them "we're at the end of one's tether and we have difficulties to make ends meet"" "We have always to play the role of a quite prosperous company director" "When you hand does the accounts - and it should have difficulties to do the accounts after having sowed" "Would you prefer that your hand no longer has to do that work, or that it has to do that work, but that this work is equivalent to sowing but in another place?" "A positive side of this job is to manage it" "Finaly, it's not unpleasant" "What is unpleasant is to have always an unbalanced management" "On the contrary, that interesting to know how much this winter barley costs me of fertilizer, of rent of the field, of ploughing, of harvest, etc." "That's not unpleasant at all" "What is a pain in the ass is that recipes don't balance the spending, and that's often since the crisis" "And that's unbalanced because remuneration of the work is not covered" "Farmers have contradictions between the interest of their job and the difficulty of balancing the business" "Take the example of the USA, which feed the world" "Which has a working class which doesn't increase" "So where working and farmer worlds are quite the same" "Because they have an agriculture that can feed the world, so which has a high industrial level" "Do you see them as enemies or friends?" "What we must see is that, in the US as in France, the are 2 kinds of culture" "That's not fair that one country feed everyone else" "Yes, but there are two kinds of culture" "On one hand, major vegetable products, wheat, soya, things like these" "And on the other hand, there are livestock productions that need work" "So, for livestock productions, like milk or meat" "They have bigger farms, but that's not very different than France" "But for major products, their first asset is to have a wonderful space" "That we don't have" "But what is often unknown is that wheat yield per hectare in France is twice the american yield" "The great luck of the Americans is to have a huge space" "And they work on this space with very powerful machines" "But it's not the intensification" "And because of this great space, American wanted to feed the world, after having been the world police" "They thought that after their failures, they had to change their tactics and dominate the world by food" "And they did it very well, there are many causes of that" "I think that Americans use wheat, soya and major agricultural products as an arm" "And in this regard, they have opportunities that are mostly related to space" "But if there is space, we return to the ground and property of space" "Because we might suppose that other countries would rent to the US parts of their space" "Yes, but I think that the USA, individually and collectively, wouldn't be ok" "Because they saw that, even at the international level, holding of the soil and ability to produce on it is a very important thing" "We can talk about it because here you rent your space" "If you were not forced to rent, would you like to have the ownership of this field, i.e. the property of these properties (properties of the soil)?" "Well, I think that soil shouldn't be the object of an ownership" "And the work, yes?" "But the work, yes" "Because when soil is the object of an ownership, it immediately becomes a factor of aggressiveness between people" "Because people want to hold the soil and fight to hold the soil" "It's true for agricultural soil, but it's also true for the soil that serves to build roads and houses" "So they fight to keep it or to overvalue it when they want to sell it" "How much and what area do you rent?" "We rent to the GAEC just under 70 hectares, just about 20,000 old francs per hectare" "But as there is no difficulty for it, I don't protest against the price" "This price can perfectly be justified" "But because of the ownership, we see people who were farmers on a soil and whose the owner decided to take back this soil" "To rent it to someone else, or sometimes even to sterilize it" "So the worker is laid off exactly as if we closed the factory" "In March, comrades participated in an action" "An industrialist got an ownership that he rented to a farmer to work the soil" "And the guy decided to take back the soil to put horses" "He used his property right." "Legally, there's nothing to say" "So there has been an action" "The guy had turned his field into pasture" "So the peasants ploughed it" "It was a wild action that doesn't settle anything" "These actions are done to raise people awareness of the problem of the intellectual property of the soil" "But collective property could pose the same hassles" "Because a community could take ownership of the soil and have an excessive power on it" "And now there are competitions between soils" "Urban soil or factory soil or infrastructure soil are in competition with agricultural soil" "That's such a bloody mess when they want to get a highway across a field" "And that throws away a number of agricultural holdings" "That's why the problem of the soil is important" "Laws being what they are, people are almost encouraged to become owners" "And becoming an owner, that's a huge thing, because when we have no capital - what is he case of many people " "It supposes to borrow to the bank and to pay off the loan during 30 years" "It means that, during 30 years, the guys will tighten his belt, underpay himself" "And then, he is well bellow the minimum wage" "He will bore his wife or make her working as rough, she won't have the minimum to get dressed" "It will be the same thing for kids" "They will be well below the standing of the workers' kids" "And all that to pay a soil that will be paid when they'll return to the grave" "That's where we find a huge absuridty, not to mention the conflicts there are" "It's completely against the grain of what exists" "But I think that an advanced society should look for a non-property of the soil" "I think that collective property is something we should go beyond" "This is really the non-property that should be" "Because there is no property of the air nor of the see" "That's the kind of things we discover when we plough" "The guy like me, farmer for 23 years" "Well, there's no problem" "But a day, me or another, maybe we won't be able of being famers, because the owner want to sell or find another guy" "Over and above the fact that with the technicity and the productivity, farmers look always for more and more soil" "Because formerly, when people had little farms and produced especially for themselves" "They were satisfied with what they had" "More machines they have, more soil they want, and more they attack between them, and more they eliminate between them" "Here, landed property and simply the property are source of aggression" "And when some people make a difference between the little and the big properties, I think that's a wrong difference" "Because 2 small owners are as aggressive as 2 large owners or 2 large trusts" "Ultimately, it is in the nature of ownership that conflicts are based" "DIRECTION BY"