Agrifood transition: "The need to consider farming as a business " (A. Bourolleau, Hectar)

“Financing a farm and making a living amid entirely new expectations from entrepreneurs and employees means that agriculture must reorganise around this social dimension. Critical mass and value creation are the two pillars we’re working on. We need to bring management skills back to the core of the system and rethink farming as a business like any other — built on the same fundamentals. It may sound obvious to someone from another industry, but in agriculture it’s still far from common practice,” said Audrey Bourolleau, co-founder and director of Hectar, in an interview with News Tank on 15 October 2025. A former agricultural adviser to Emmanuel Macron, Audrey Bourolleau now heads the Hectar pilot farm in the Yvelines department (with Xavier Niel, French Tech businessman, as stakeholder of the project). Hectar's vision is to drive a social transition in farm organisation to strengthen profitability alongside the shift toward more sustainable agricultural models.

“To attract new entrants for farming and to drive generation renewal, we emphasise that a farm is first and foremost a…