Mathieu Couturier spends his days minding livestock and tending crops on his farms tucked in what is known as the diagonal du vide, a sparsely populated swath of land stretching from the Landes region in southwestern France to Meuse in the northeast.
Spanning 175 hectares, the two farms located deep in the Creuse region are the source of Couturier’s livelihood – yielding organic produce such as wheat and eggs. But that’s under threat these days.
Over the past two years, Couturier has been struggling to make ends meet. “I am getting by, but I’m in deep debt,” he says, exasperated. “We used to sell a tonne of wheat for €500 or €600. Last year, we sold it for about €300. That’s half the price. A year like that really hurts financially.”
Couturier’s situation is far from unique. Despite being the largest agricultural producer in the European Union, France is facing a farming crisis so acute that it has taken an irreversible toll on its workers. Burdened by low incomes, little to no time off, mounting debts and dizzying amounts of paperwork, French farmers are suffering a mental health epidemic.
The statistics are alarming. One farmer dies by suicide every two days in France, and twice as many farming households as the national average live below the poverty line, according to a 2024 report by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work.
“This year is going to be decisive. If I don’t manage to have a normal year financially speaking, I will be forced to stop [working as a farmer]. The debt load will just be too heavy to carry. I won’t be able to pay my bills or my rent,” Couturier explains.
“This life… it’s complicated.”
A national cause?
More than 370 kilometres away, one of the largest agricultural fairs in the world is taking place in Paris. The 2025 “Salon de l’Agriculture” opened its doors on February 22 and will close on March 2. Every year, it attracts around 600,000 visitors and gathers thousands of farmers from across the country to exhibit their livestock, produce and farming tools.
Read moreWhy is Paris’s annual agriculture show such a big deal in France?
But the event is not all roses. A debate on the mental health of farmers was organised by the social protection scheme for agricultural workers, the Mutualité Sociale Agricole (MSA), on Thursday.
“Can you imagine a more anxiety-inducing profession?” said Arnaud Simion, a Socialist MP from the Haute-Garonne region in southern France. “There are so many factors that affect the mental health of farmers. Low salaries, no rest, no vacation days, complex administrative tasks… And now there are environmental consequences brought on by climate change to take into account, too!”
The day before the Paris agricultural fair kicked off, Simion organised a conference on the issue at the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament, in an attempt to ring the alarm bell on what the government pegged a “national cause” in 2025 for all of French society.
But the issue was completely overshadowed by a controversial bill on the industrialisation of farms and decriminalising environmental offences which had been adopted the day before.
“There has been a lot of talk on the issue,” Simion said. “Yet zero mention of it in the recently passed law.”
Last year’s fair saw enraged French farmers stage mass protests to express their anger over low incomes, the pricing of agricultural products and ongoing trade negotiations with distributors – including a proposed free trade agreement between the EU and the South American trade bloc Mercosur. The scale and fury of the demonstrations took the government by surprise as farmers blocked roads with convoys of tractors, spreading from the southwest of France across the whole country.
While no protests have sprung up so far this year, many farmers can’t shake off the feeling that nothing has changed.
Suicide, a silent killer
Michou, a former dairy farmer in the Loire-Atlantique region, joined an agricultural holding company (GAEC) with his colleague Raymond back in April 2011. Together, they were six farmers and two full-time employees. Alongside his longtime colleague and friend, Michou worked from 5:30am to 8pm every single day of the year. “We were drowning in work,” he recalls.
“Until one day at 6am, I found Raymond had hung himself in his barn,” he says. “It was terrible.”
Though he has now left the holding company, retired and handed down the farm to his 33-year-old nephew Elie, Michou says his friend’s death still impacts him. “I went weeks without sleeping. I was depressed. And I think I’m still suffering the after-effects of it all. My brain took quite a beating,” he says. “Last week, I dreamt that we were working together in the summertime, even though it’s been 14 years.”
“I worked with Raymond for 20 years. He was like a brother to me,” he adds. “These are things that scar you for life.”
Read moreThe quiet suicide epidemic plaguing French farmers
Deaths by suicide are 43 percent more common among farmers than the rest of the population, according to a report by the MSA.
Even if he says the working conditions are better for his nephew, Michou doesn’t believe that much has improved for French farmers. “The more years pass, the more complicated it gets … The biggest problem is that there are no guarantees for the prices of products we sell. Everything can be dandy and boom! – from one day to the next, the war in Ukraine can break out, for example. That was a catastrophe. Cereal, fertiliser and fuel prices went soaring. It’s just unmanageable.”
When it comes to organic farmers like Couturier, prospects seem even more bleak. Following years of steady growth, French organic food market sales suddenly dropped by five percent in 2022. The amount of traditional farmland conversions to organic practices dropped significantly too, with the number of farmers going back to old methods increasing.
“The cost of living has risen sharply. And what is the first thing to go when that happens? Food, groceries,” Couturier says, referring to the decline in consumption of organic goods in recent years. “Last year, when we realised we wouldn’t be able to harvest the crops we’d sown because of weather conditions and that the yields were more than catastrophic, there was a lot of stress.”
“I saw people I would least expect break down last year. People I deemed ‘solid’. And that worries me,” he recalls. “I feel intense anxiety. I’m trying to manage it. It makes me a lot more nervous than I used to be. But the uncertainty about what’s going to happen this year makes me constantly anxious.”
Insufficient solutions, slow change
To try and improve the mental health of farmers, the MSA launched a free hotline open 24/7 and operated by counsellors and psychologists specialising in suicide nearly a decade ago, in 2014. And with support from the Ministry of Agriculture, the organisation also set up a network of volunteers in rural areas in 2022 to help identify farmers in need of support.
Charities like Solidarité Paysans have also offered local support to agricultural workers across the country for more than 30 years. Volunteers are often retirees or former farmers themselves, giving them a deeper understanding of the issues unique to the industry.
And the French Chamber of Agriculture also set up specialised units in each regional department of the country to provide personalised support.
But even if these forms of support exist, the plight of French farmers doesn’t seem to be abating.
“There is a real lack of support for this industry that we are carrying on our backs, which I believe is virtuous, which I believe in,” Couturier says. “I’m still convinced it’s worth it, but it’s hard.”
One year after protests, French farming still in crisis
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Florian Manneville and Abdou Omorou, both public health doctors and researchers, launched a project with the Université de Lorraine late last year to find new ways to improve farmers’ mental health. Starting from the premise that farmers lack support, the first year of their research has been dedicated to gathering data from farmers in eastern France about their mental health.
“We have had about 753 respondents so far,” says Manneville. “We ask about their general well-being, how they feel at work, their stress levels, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. And we do this over a year-long trajectory, checking in every six months.”
“Our preliminary findings have already yielded some results, but we are still in the early stages,” adds Omorou.
“Female farmers tend to have poorer mental health than their male counterparts. The same goes for farmers in vulnerable social situations who lack social support systems. There are also noticeable differences when it comes to livestock farming; mental health tends to be poorer than those farming crops. And farmers without high school degrees also tend to have more mental health issues than those who graduated or went into higher education,” Manneville explains.
The second leg of their project will be focused on building concrete ways to prevent mental health decline in farmers. Working hand in hand with organisations like the MSA or Solidarité Paysans, the researchers will analyse the underlying factors gathered from interviews and surveys with agricultural workers and then come up with practical solutions to improve their quality of life.
“Doing good is easy. Doing it well is much more complicated,” says Omorou. “We are going to look at all existing support systems and sort through them so that we can suggest something that takes into account the entire ecosystem of the agricultural industry.”
In the meantime, Couturier will carry on farming. “I’ve had to fend for myself since I was 15. I witnessed the difficulties of the job through my dad,” who was a farmer like Couturier.
“But I won’t let it ruin my life.”
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