Caroline Baudry (special correspondent in Occitanie) / Photo credits: VINCENT FEURAY / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 10:17 a.m., January 25, 2024

Faced with the difficulties faced by their elders, fewer and fewer young people are deciding to turn to agricultural careers while more than half of farmers will retire within ten years.

For Europe 1, this young generation talks about their concerns for the profession.

Will there always be farmers to take over the farms?

Fewer and fewer young people are choosing to opt for agricultural careers while more than half of farmers will retire within ten years.

In the Toulouse region, Europe 1 went to meet students from an agricultural high school who are worried about their future.

"It's necessary that it moves"

In this establishment, in the middle of the fields, classes resume after the break.

Regardless, Lucas, aged 19 and a BTS agricultural student, wants to answer the questions: "Without going to school, maybe we won't have a diploma but it won't be of any use if we have more farmers,” he explains.

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For this young man, agriculture is a passion, a vocation.

Even if his parents, themselves operators, tried to dissuade him: "They don't want young people to have the life they had. I have parents who have never taken a vacation. They work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. They wear out a lot more than normal. Things have to move,” says the young man.

“We couldn’t eat properly”

So Lucas sleeps on straw on a dam.

For several days, 17-year-old students have been participating in the farmers' protest movement in their own way.

They post photos on Instagram with tractors or fields as a sign of support.

They see their parents' precariousness: "We couldn't feed ourselves properly. We asked our family to help us," explains Lillian, another student. 

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Lillian preferred to turn to the mechanical sector with the agricultural specialty option to make a living from her passion as, for example, an employee in a garage.

A high school employee confides that these students party less than their elders at the same age, as if a weight, he says, had fallen on their shoulders.