S'installer en circuits courts : quelles difficultés sur le plan du travail pour les éleveurs "NIMA" ?

International audience

Inglés. In metropolitan France, nearly one in five livestock farmers sell part of their production via short food supply chains (SFSC), in very different configurations. Newly established breeders, especially those from non-agricultural backgrounds, are involved in these increasingly diverse sales methods. Sales, and sometimes transformation, complicate work organization, which is already very constraint in livestock farming because of routine tasks. What organizational difficulties do new livestock farmers face in their first years of their establishment in SFSC ? We propose to report on preliminary observations made with 7 of them established over the past 10 years, in two French regions (Auvergne and Occitanie), through semi-structured interviews on trajectory on settlement stage (including first years of their system’s implementation). During several years, these breeders explore diverse types of SFSC. Thus, they test the compatibility of existing SFSC with their work organization, the levels of remuneration they hoped for, and their preferences. Each SFSC is indeed characterized by a particular range of products, customers, logistical organization and group of producers. It is also a way to secure the sale of their production, which is often growing, by ensuring access to different outlets. However, exploration of this diversity of marketing arrangements represents a high workload and a complex work organization that is often poorly anticipated. These difficulties, which add to the difficulties inherent in setting up without a family farming history (time to acquire operational skills), can lead to critical work situations : "extended" work days, delays in secondary tasks impacting product quality, exhaustion, departure of members of the work collective… To overcome these difficulties, livestock farmers make adjustments such as selecting a smaller number of outlets on the basis of their hourly profitability (including transport), abandoning SFSC, limiting herd size or hiring outside.