Press coverage

To set up 300 market garden farms in France within the next seven years, on a human scale and with a profitable model. This is the ambition of the Cultive project, launched in 2022. After raising €100,000 when it was first set up, the project raised a second €400,000 a few weeks ago, to accelerate its deployment.

Baptiste Saulnier and Vanessa Correa don't aim for happiness by withdrawing into their cocoon, but rather by taking part in a movement to radically change our agricultural model. (Cultive, their training and support program for small-scale organic and intensive farming, will soon be opening its campus in (...)

Trading in your keyboard and mouse for a watering can and a few seeds... Utopia? To help you get over the hurdle, there are a number of training courses, like Cultive's, that teach you how to become an organic market gardener. Interview with Baptiste Saulnier, co-founder of Cultive.

There's a rather striking figure: more than 250,000 French farmers will be retiring by 2030, with no guarantee of resuming their activity. This is largely due to the fact that the profession suffers from a lack of attractiveness to younger generations, who are no longer willing to work themselves to exhaustion for derisory remuneration and little recognition.

Vanessa Correa, women in agriculture. The Rencontres nationales du retour à la terre has selected the work and careers of 10 women farmers - market gardeners, livestock breeders, cereal growers... Among them, Vanessa Correa from Tourouvre-au-Perche.

At the Sival trade show in Angers, we met up with Baptiste Saulnier and Vanessa Correa, who have launched the Cultive project in 2022 to provide concrete solutions for agriculture by offering "a career path for market gardeners wishing to work on organic farms, on a human scale, with a profitable model".

With over 100,000 farms disappearing in France in the last 10 years, and 50% of French farmers due to retire by 2030, our agricultural model is showing its limits. The situation is even more worrying for market gardeners, since it is estimated that 70% of them do not make it past the 5-year mark, due to the lack of a robust economic model.

Start-up Cultive has raised €500,000 for its project combining a pilot farm, a training center for bio-intensive agronomic techniques and a service for farmers wanting to start up or change their farming practices. The aim is to install 300 farms by 2031.

The innovative approach of the Cultive project is based on unique training and personalized support for market gardeners, a segment particularly hard hit by the crisis in French agriculture.