By Adèle Pautrat

Ferme des Olivoux  is divided into two plots: in the distance in this photo, crops for seed production; at the front, crops for vegetable production. © Adèle Violette

In June 2024, Seeds4All spent a few days at Ferme des Olivoux, an organic vegetable farm located in Montignac, in the French Dordogne.

Emilie Demarquilly and Ricardo Carneiro have been farming here since January 2023. They don't own the land but rent it under an agricultural lease. They cultivate about two hectares with a variety of vegetables, legumes and flowers. Most of their produce is sold directly, they supply a local school canteen, and they have a stall at the Montignac market once a week.

In addition to growing vegetables, they reproduce organic seeds for Ferme de Sainte Marthe, an organic seed company based in Maine-et-Loire. Emilie is mainly responsible for this task, leveraging her experience working at Ferme de Sainte Marthe and at Limagrain, a French seed corporation that is among the six multinationals controlling almost the entire global seed market.

This special background allows Emilie to understand the challenges of seed production from both an industrial and artisanal perspective. We interviewed her, focusing specifically on her views regarding the sustainability of these two models.

On the farm: three greenhouses and rows of 50m © Adèle Violette

Born into a farming family, Emilie initially studied biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences, and later qualified as an agronomist from Institut Agro Dijon. During a university internship, she worked for six months at KWS, a seed company operating in over 70 countries. It was there that Emilie first encountered the methods and challenges of plant breeding. She initially worked on barley varieties and later on wheat.

This experience led her to pursue roles in the industrial sector, and she was soon hired by Limagrain, where she spent several years working on rapeseed variety breeding programs aimed at biofuel production.

She describes the selection process: "We start in a greenhouse, then move to the field. We observe, note, select, discard, and repeat for many years before obtaining a variety that can be officially registered and commercialised.” In other words, a variety that meets the European legislative requirements for distinctness, uniformity, and stability, as well as the criteria sought by farmers in the market. “The whole process for creating a single variety can take up to 10 years,” Emilie says. “During my time, Limagrain worked on multiple varieties at once, but given the complexity, the company rarely released more than five to 10 new varieties per year.”

Rapeseed breeding involves developing hybrids through a very complex process. To make a hybrid, you need three plants: a male plant, a sterile female plant, and a fertility restorer. The restorer has the same characteristics as the female, but is fertile and restores the female’s fertility.

I naively ask, “Wouldn’t it be easier to use a fertile female plant?” Emilie explains. “Rapeseed self-pollinates 80% of the time, making it difficult to pollinate a female with a chosen male. The female must be sterilised—but not completely, or it won’t be able to be fertilised. We use maintainers and restorers… It’s all very complicated, even I get confused sometimes,” Emilie says, laughing. “It’s been a while.”

She continues, losing me completely when she explains that the males are crossed with radish genes. "We try to replicate natural mechanisms, but in reality, it's manipulation. We didn’t produce GMOs, but it was still heavily manipulated.”

What's more, manipulation and experimentation require considerable financial resources. Emilie gives me an example. “To save a year in selection, we created doubled haploids, essentially chromosome stocks. A doubled haploid plant costs around €20 to produce, and Limagrain produced around 20,000 per year, although half were sterile and degenerated.”

She concludes, “I quickly realised it was a costly, labour-intensive process, and I started questioning the purpose of this work.”

To the left, the Brune d'hiver salad variety grown to seed for Ferme de Sainte Marthe; and to the right, the Batavia de Pierre Bénite © Adèle Violette

Among the final steps in the variety creation process is verifying the seed’s intrinsic quality. For rapeseed, this primarily involves testing its oil content—oleic acid, linoleic acid. At Limagrain, this is done using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).

“We place the seeds in small capsules, and using infrared, we can determine their contents by referencing a huge database built over years of experience and constantly updated," Emilie explains, fascinated by the process, but notes, “It’s incredibly expensive.”

“Everything is expensive—the machines, the materials, the raw seeds, the glass greenhouses. The entire process consumes enormous amounts of energy. Everything is connected, powered, heated, cooled, lit—because everything needs to be controlled.”

She raises the question of the sustainability of such a system. Today, some actors can afford these procedures because it’s profitable. But what about tomorrow? “There will always be new things for breeders to discover, but if the world collapses tomorrow, this wouldn’t be a priority job for me. It’s too polluting, too energy-intensive, too labour-intensive.”

This realisation is what led Emilie to advocate for artisanal, or farmer-led, selection methods. Those practised, for example, at Ferme de Sainte Marthe. Not necessarily because they produce superior results—seed quality, variety relevance—but because Emilie believes that we must preserve the knowledge that enables humans to select seeds, and therefore cultivate their food, without needing excessive resources.

Among the varieties Emilie helped develop, she mentions some that were particularly interesting, such as a virus-resistant variety transmitted by aphids. But even so, all this work seemed superfluous to her. “Selection has been happening since the beginning of agriculture. Evolution and crossbreeding occur naturally, also in terms of adapting plants to diseases. Strictly replicating natural selection keeps us close to nature. But at Limagrain, it was all too human-driven.”

She acknowledges that varietal selection and innovation are crucial for contemporary agriculture to meet 21st-century challenges, especially adapting to climate change while reducing environmental impact.

However, industrial methods, often promoted as the only precise and efficient solutions for these challenges, seem ill-suited given the long timelines—up to 10 years to create a new variety—while climate change impacts on farmers are accelerating.

Especially when considering the cost question. And the losses, because as Emilie explains, “in industrial selection programs, until you register your variety, year after year, test after test: everything harvested is thrown away. It’s pure waste.” So we can imagine that once a variety is on the market, the goal is for it to stay there as long as possible, even though it no longer meets the evolving needs of climate and farmers.

It seems important at this point to raise the fact that the primary goal behind the breeding work of a company like Limagrain is profit. The multinationals that invest in the development of new varieties must make them profitable. Their system only holds under this condition. And the subsequent condition of grabbing as much market share as possible.

It’s not about demonising this approach but recognising and anticipating the problems it can create, especially in terms of agricultural needs and diversity. Farmers’ needs are wide-ranging, as they are linked to the very diverse practices, choices, and conditions for farming. Multinational will always be interested in varieties with the highest marketing potential, thus leaving aside considerations with less profit potential. For this reason, it seems absurd to imagine that the industrial sector alone can ensure the future of food production.

This is the key element that led Emilie to resign and train in farmer-led selection methods at Ferme de Sainte Marthe farm. Methods she considers more dynamic, more agile, and which fit into a circular logic she thinks is full of meaning.

“In farmer-led selection and multiplication, basically, you do your job as a farmer. You manage your season well, you observe your plants. If some aren’t doing well, or fall ill, you remove them. Then the batch you harvest goes to cleaning and is sold directly. Nothing is wasted, everything evolves in real-time, and adapts from one year to the other.”

Here too, Emilie is not trying to pit the quality of industrial varieties against the quality of artisanal varieties. “The existence of one does not necessarily negate the other, and farmer-led selection also presents risks,” she says; starting with the fact that it can be more directly subject to climatic hazards. Also, since the farmer needs to be sure of a stable harvest, the plants must be healthy and resistant to disease. Emilie insists on this point: as a seed grower, she is subject to regular checks by both Ferme de Sainte Marthe and the French authorities.

After several years' experience, however, Emilie seems fairly convinced that farmer-led selection is more sustainable, thus playing a major role in the evolution of agriculture, particularly at a time when agri-environmental conditions are as uncertain as they are today.

In the middle: a spinach variety grown for seeds © Adèle Violette

At one point during the interview, Emilie muses: “The success of industrial seeds depends on the chemicals used on them. Rapeseed has one of the highest incidences of pesticide treatment. Farmers pay a lot for the hybrid seeds, then they are forced to pay annual fees and to buy more and more pesticides. So what’s the real benefit? High yield, perhaps, but at a massive cost, leading to debt. Couldn’t a farmer using organic seed varieties fare better in terms of costs? That’s the key question I suppose.”

As a matter of fact, the question of whether it makes economic sense for farmers to regain their independence when it comes to seeds continues to be hotly debated.

This raises an issue that has always interested us at Seeds4All: the possibility for farmers to access an alternative seed offer that would be sufficiently attractive to compete with the industrial seed sector.

To date, and despite the adoption in 2018 of new measures to facilitate the marketing of seed varieties adapted to the specific characteristics of organic farming, the supply of organic seed on the European market remains low. The work of organic variety breeders and propagators is struggling to stabilise, due to significant economic pressure.

At around the same time as our visit to Ferme des Olivoux, Hannes Lorenzen of ARC2020 was meeting organic plant breeders at Christiansen organic farm in Schleswig-Holstein, in the far north of Germany.

One of the issues Hannes discussed with Heinz Peter Christiansen, co-owner of the farm, was the question of the costs involved in breeding organic and, above all, open-pollinated varieties that farmers can use freely.

Despite the recognition he receives for his work, Heinz Peter Christiansen talks about the fact that when refusing to use patents, a breeder is faced with a complicated financial equation. Dive into this tricky debate by reading our conversation with him.