Host Richard Perkins interviews Claire and Gail (the Gonne Girls) about starting a regenerative agriculture business in Normandy. The guests describe their motivation, the multi-year administrative and educational hurdles in France (land purchase risks, SAFER preemption, and a required National French Diploma for Agriculture), and early farm activities including mobile egg units, no-dig market gardens, agroforestry with tree planting, and grazing horses.
Chapters
Welcome to another episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today we've got special guests Claire and Gail from Ghana, girls in Normandy in France. And they were actually the recipients of our Ecosia start regenerative agriculture funding that's granted 50 or loaned €50,000 to them for the startup of their business. And they started up March this year with a ridgerdale style egg mobile no dig market gardens as well as planting a lot of trees in association with Ecosia for an agroforestry system. They are grazing their horses there at the property too. And all at the same time is relocating home to renovate an old farmhouse whilst raising kids. And a whole other things to talk about today. So thank you so much, you two, for taking the time to be with us today.
Thanks.
So let's start with like going back a bit. How, how did you both get involved in this and how did you two formulate a plan to start start a farm together?
So Gail and I both were living in Paris. I'm South African, Gail is Norman, And we're both kind of thinking about what was next in our lives. I had stopped. I was in the transition between two different jobs and had kind of reached the end of the Internet. I was reading everything I could while I was waiting to change jobs and landed up in the Becky Luang book about permaculture and kind of fell in love and got to chapter three, went for a drink with Gail and said, okay, I think I know what I want to do with my life. I'm going to do this. And said, me too. And we were very drunk and probably shouldn't have made a decision after so many years, but we did. And the land is part of my husband's family's farm. They've never farmed it. It was always rented to one family. And the farmer died before the end of the lease. And it was five, six years ago, I think that he died and the farm just didn't sell. It's a beautiful piece of land, 3km away from the beach. All the stud farms around us wanted it, but for some reason it just kept falling through. And so I kind of said to my husband, oh, I think the farm doesn't want to get sold. We might have to do something with it. And so we decided to sit down. We sat down every Monday night and started figuring out how to farm in France, which is not simple. Even if you have bought your land, you still have to apply for an authorization to exploit your land. And we didn't have the points to be able to do that. So it was three years of administration to help to try and get to this point, which I think is what.
Does that mean to exploit, like to actually utilize the land for production?
So France is very, very difficult. And it's one of the things that I think we're both quite passionate about is access to land. It's incredibly difficult to get access to farmland unless you have it in your family, which means that it stays in the privileged hands. We only got it because it could be passed. In fact, we don't own the land. It's. My husband's brother bought the land and we're renting it for five years until we can buy it without anyone preempting the sale. Because in France, to be able to buy a piece of land, there is an association called the SAFA that can come in right up until the signature and can preempt the sale, set the price and stop the sale from going through. And then once the sale has gone through, you still have to apply for this authorization to exploit it. And there is a great, I don't know, ranking with points. And you don't have a choice as an owner. Either you don't rent it at all or you take the person. Everyone else can apply, it's public. Everyone else can apply to exploit the land. And if there's someone else with more points, you can either give it to them or you can't, or you don't rent it, but you can't choose.
That's a bizarre system.
It's very protectionist. It's very good in a way, because it's about food protection and stuff. But it doesn't. In reality, it's stops people from getting access to land. And that's also why we had to secure access to that land or our ability to manage that land. We had to do a diploma for one year last year, an agri diploma, the National French Diploma for Agriculture. So we went back to ag school. The one you said didn't wasn't very useful, like a level. We had to go through this one year and we had our exams in December last year. So it was quite a. It was a long process. We had the idea that drink was end of 2016 and then we moved July last year and we started March this year. So it took a while.
What is that diploma about? That's something that anyone would have to do if they wanted to come into farming in France without like a farming background.
Yeah, yeah.
And what did you. What did you get up to during that Time. Like, what does that look like in reality?
A lot of hard work. It's. It's no way. I think it was useful. It's very general. So you have accounting how the Social Security works for farmers in France. When we. What else did we do? Marketing. Marketing. I mean, it's. It's metric level stuff. I mean, a level stuff. So it's not very challenging. But there are eight weeks of internship that are. Yeah, that's good. That you have to do mandatory. And so that gave us the time to go and visit the farms that we wanted to visit and spend the time on it. And that was the most useful of the thing.
What farms did you go to? Like, what enterprises were you exposed to in that?
We did four weeks of market garden and. Four weeks. I mean, two weeks in chickens and then two weeks in cows. Two weeks in cows and horses. Yeah, exactly. There was a mix. And then for the market garden, we went to Lille in the north of France with a couple who had worked for. Worked for two years at the Becque? E Loire and they set up a farm there for Deolia. It's large French company, urban farm. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah. They'd spent a lot of time going back and forth to Canada to work to see JM as well. So it was a mix as well of that stuff. And they were in their second year. Yeah. So it was good for us to be with them as well. Very, very interesting couple. So those four weeks were great. Yeah, the eggs were. Was a classic. Yeah, Egg producer. Producer in. Not in organic. In a free range. Because definitely we saw that big thing economically on eggs here is that the price of the food is almost double what you guys are paying in the Nordics. So a lot of the people who start off wanting to do organic fed eggs rather do non omg. Now Gail knows the English and I know the French. It's great. And so it was quite interesting to see that economic reasoning in their heads as well. Don't.
