The hybrid workers seeking fulfilment in the fields

Matthew Charlton teaches at a prestigious university - when he is not growing watercress

Desperate for a break from office drudgery but scared of not making ends meet? France has an idea that might interest you: part-time farming.

A new tribe has been identified that wants the best of both worlds: city and country; laptop and the land; the digital and the manual.

These young mould-breakers use the opportunities of technology and workplace flexibility for a hybrid lifestyle that – they say – fits today’s desire for meaning as well as money.

Working the soil brings the rewards of physical labour, and a sense of purpose too often missing from their spreadsheets and tabulations.

But by edging in gently to farming, they keep the financial assurance of a back-up city salary, as well as the intellectual sustenance of their urban social circle.

“In the corporate world, there are more and more people questioning the meaning of what they are doing. There’s an awful lot of burn-out and anxiety,” says Julien Maudet, data-engineer and cider-maker.

“On the farm, you don’t have to ask. It’s obvious why you’re doing it. It’s to produce food for people. But you’re doing it in conditions that are often very uncertain and risky.

“These two worlds - the farm and the office - are in crisis. And it dawned on me that each is the solution to the other. What we need to do is bring the two worlds together.”

Maudet is one of the founders of Slasheurs-cueilleurs, an organisation that seeks to promote these new cross-over careers.

The name is a wordplay in French, because it sounds like the expression chasseurs-cueilleurs (hunter-gatherers). The slasheur part comes from the slash key on a computer, and denotes someone with more than one job (as in “I’m a chef-slash-football coach).

The organisation Slasheurs-cueilleurs brings people together to exchange ideas on the part-time agricultural lifestyle

The idea came to Maudet during the Covid lockdowns, when he went to ground at his grandparents’ farm in Normandy. When he began looking a year ago, he realised that there were already hundreds of people doing what he was advocating. “We invented nothing. We just shone a light,” he says.

A classic example is Matthew Charlton, an English-born teacher at Sorbonne university who now spends more than half his week growing watercress in a smallholding 64km (40 miles) south of Paris.

This part of the Essonne department was once famous for its “green gold”, but many cressonnières were abandoned from the 1970s and are only now being resurrected.

“The beauty of watercress is that you don’t need machinery or massive investment. It’s just you and a pair of gumboots and a knife,” says Charlton, who harvests around 30,000 bunches every year for sale to farm shops and restaurants in Paris.

“Today I am at the university on Mondays and Thursdays. The other days I am here at the farm or else delivering the cress in Paris – which is where I live.

Matthew tends the land in an area once renowned for its watercress, or "green gold"

“It’s a lifestyle that suits me perfectly. I get a lot of outdoors, then I can recharge my batteries two days a week in Paris. Eventually I want to do the cress full time, but this way I’ve been able to ease my way in, without taking on too much of a financial gamble.”

Some of those who have become slasheurs have inherited family land; others rent it, or buy it, or have arrangements with farmers to pool resources. Some live in the country for a couple of days a week; some make a reverse commute to fields in the city hinterland; some work seasonally.

In the city they are lawyers, engineers and consultants. In the country they are market-gardeners, winegrowers or labourers. Only a few work with livestock, which demands a more permanent presence.

What seems to unite them is a yearning for spiritual fulfilment, as well as an attachment to the idea of cleaner, organic production. All agree that office-based careers have left them at times feeling redundant and pointless.

Marie makes cider from apples grown in Normandy, and also works part-time in Paris

Marie Paitier, a cider-maker and human resources consultant, says she and her husband both suffered "burn out” – by which she means emotional breakdowns – because of their city jobs.

“It wasn’t just my employer’s fault. It was me,” she says. “I was working too hard. But now I share my time between Normandy, where we live and the children go to school, and Paris where I work part-time.

“I didn’t want to leave everything behind. I liked my job in Paris – and the money is important. But this way we have the right balance.”

City types have always dreamed of a simpler rural life, and there have been previous waves of emigration to the country – notably in the post-May ‘68 generation. What is different now are the possibilities opened up by technology - remote working, artificial intelligence, flexible careers - as well as the growing importance of ecology as a factor in the choices we make.

“This isn’t about rich people from the city playing at being farmers,” says Maudet. “Our vision is that this will be part of a fundamental change.

“Our farms need more hands if they’re to produce the kind of quality food which we should be eating. If we don’t get people into the fields, then farms will get bigger and bigger and more and more industrial.

“And office workers, under threat from A.I., are looking for new outlets. We would be so much more resilient as a society, if we all went in to something more hybrid.”