The agricultural transition campus

See you in Lévis-Saint-Nom, in the Yvelines. Of the 800 hectares that make up the town, 600 belong to the Domaine de La Boissière, taken over by the founders of Hectar to install their entire ecosystem there. On site: a training campus, a startup accelerator, a pilot farm in regenerative agriculture, and coworking rooms and seminars. About thirty kilometers from Paris, this space combines rurality and innovation. Objective: to create fertile ground for agricultural transition.

The Hectar project was born from the will of Audrey Bourolleau, a French entrepreneur from a family of farmers from Niort, who has long campaigned for soil preservation. After a stint as an advisor to Emmanuel Macron on agricultural issues between 2017 and 2019, she wanted to take action at the end of the 2010s by setting up a project, which according to Valérie Fuchs, a member of Hectar, “wants to be a total break with the traditional agricultural world”. According to her, “Agriculture is one of our most powerful tools for responding to the environmental transition, but this environment sometimes suffers from a lack of advice and support structures.”

Hectar is therefore aimed at entrepreneurs in the agricultural world “it is a campus with its own ecosystem, which welcomes young people, people undergoing professional retraining and farmers who want to test new projects” indicates Valérie Fuchs. In this multifaceted place, the challenge is threefold. The aim is to register French agriculture in a more sustainable approach, while ensuring fair and attractive remuneration to operators, to allow them to project themselves, and in the long term, answer the question of the lack of workforce in this sector where it is estimated that 70,000 positions are to be filled.

Like every disruptive project, Hectar is the subject of numerous criticisms, most of which come from a more traditional peasant world. At the end of March 2022, a collective in favor of public agricultural education met to alert to the risks represented by this project, which according to them “is above all an accelerator for start-ups”, and “instrumentalizes the agricultural world in favor of values that are incompatible with the reality on the ground”. Questioned on this subject, Valérie Fuchs answers that the aim of Hectar is “absolutely not to challenge French agricultural technical education”, before continuing by indicating that the actions of this new campus are not “competing with public agricultural education, but quite complementary”.

If Hectar does not compete with traditional agricultural higher education, it is because the new campus provides a different type of training, based on exchange and mentoring. Valérie Fuchs explains it: “Each year, around 70 people join the HECTAR mentoring program with very varied projects and profiles: cereal, vegetable or livestock farming, established professional or entrepreneur in retraining”. On site, support is provided individually, with a more experienced professional as a mentor. In a few weeks, each profile is studied and remodelled to make it economically and environmentally viable.

To extend this support not only to operators, but also to entrepreneurs with projects that are less directly linked to rural areas, Hectar has established a partnership with the HEC Paris incubator. Antoine d'Espalungue, the manager of this incubator, says: “The objective is to support 80 startups over two years [...] each development takes place in two phases, an intensive first of three to four months where the provision of Hectar spaces allows startups to experiment with their solutions and sometimes to redefine their objective, then a second phase of one and a half years, which allows entrepreneurs to take the time to develop, to meet the investors in our network, and to exchange with their colleagues.”

This new reactor of agricultural innovation, even if it is subject to numerous criticisms, remains one of the only organizations implementing major resources to include French agriculture in the environmental transition. With its operation based on tutoring and networking, it is possible that in the relatively short term, a network of new farmers will be created, integrating a wide variety of profiles ranging from tech to finance professions, including coding and artificial intelligence.