The figure speaks for itself: in Wallonia, for every ten market garden farms that close, only four new ones start up. Understanding why puts words on a reality shared by thousands of growers.
At PermaTechnics, we work every day alongside market gardeners immersed in the realities of the job. In a sector where digital tools remain fragmented, we try to add our own stone to the building, by helping to plan crops and organise tasks
But we know the challenges go far beyond organisation. For us as much as for you, it is essential to look squarely at the causes that push so many growers to give up.
1. The economics do not balance
69% of European farmers judge their income insufficient to keep their farm going.
One of the major difficulties in market gardening comes down to a single observation: the cost structure is the same as for any self-employed activity, while the income is nothing like comparable. Where a professional in private practice bills more than €100 an hour, a market gardener sells lettuces at €1 each.
Social security charges, VAT and compulsory contributions weigh identically on every self-employed person. But when your turnover depends on the weather, on pests and on market prices, the equation quickly becomes difficult.
To pay for one hour of advice or legal expertise, you will have to sell about a hundred lettuces. And those 100 lettuces represent hours of soil preparation, sowing, upkeep, harvesting, packing and selling.
The initial debt makes things worse. For a market gardener, you are looking at €20,000 to €60,000 to start on one hectare, a sum that is already considerable when access to credit remains difficult. Business incubators and crowdfunding are emerging as alternatives, but they remain partial solutions.
What can help: veg box subscription schemes secure part of the income by selling before you sow. But that calls for commercial skills that are rarely taught in agricultural training.
2. Land priced out of reach
Access to land has become the first lock on the door. The CAP, by subsidising per hectare, mechanically favours large structures and turns land into a financial investment. The small plots suited to diversified market gardening are either priced out of reach to buy, or impossible to rent on a long lease.
Between 2000 and 2010, the number of European farms under 10 hectares fell by a quarter. The land does not disappear, it is absorbed by ever larger farms, often arable ones. For a new market gardener with no family capital, setting up becomes an obstacle course.
The problem is particularly acute for those who rent: investing time and money to improve a soil you can lose overnight makes little economic sense. And yet a living, rich soil is the basis of everything in market gardening.
The alternatives remain limited: initiatives such as Terre-en-vue try to take land out of the speculative market, but faced with the financial stakes, these solutions remain marginal.
3. The body wears out, the mind cracks
50 to 60 hours a week on average, with peaks at 80 hours in peak season. Market gardening wears the body down: a back broken by weeding, knees damaged by harvesting, repeated tendinitis. Musculoskeletal disorders are not a risk but close to a certainty in the medium term.
Isolation makes everything worse. The unusual hours, up at 5 am, in bed after the paperwork, cut you off from other people’s rhythms. Couples wobble under the pressure. Holidays? “If I leave the field for a week, I have a month of catching up to do.”
More than half of those working in farming report significant psychosocial pressure. The Agri’écoute helpline takes more than 300 calls a month in France. Burnout is becoming almost the norm, but admitting it is still taboo in a world where “strength” is prized.
Fragile safeguards: mutual help between market gardeners exists and sometimes literally saves the day. Peer groups become spaces where people can speak freely. But many crack in silence, out of reserve.
4. An environment that has become unpredictable
Climate disruption has turned market gardening into a kind of lottery. Long droughts followed by torrential rain, late frosts, early heatwaves, the old landmarks are shattered. One year, it is the lack of water that wipes out the crops. The next, too much rain rots the harvest.
Pests multiply with the mild temperatures. Slugs, aphids and flea beetles arrive earlier and stay longer. Biological solutions exist but they are expensive and demand constant vigilance. One moment of inattention and an entire crop is gone.
This instability makes any planning a gamble. How do you forecast your income when ten minutes of hail can destroy six months of work? Crop insurance exists but the premiums are prohibitive for small diversified holdings.
Costly adaptation: greenhouses, hail netting, efficient irrigation, the technical solutions exist but they call for investment that few can afford. Resilience has a price the market does not recognise.
5. Admin that eats the time
“Do not take these steps on your own!” When that is the official advice, you can measure the size of the problem. Setting up involves a long list of contacts: chambres d’agriculture, MSA, tax offices, health inspections. Every body has its own requirements, its own deadlines, its own forms.
The rules pile up. Crop records, plant protection traceability, area declarations, each obligation is justified on its own and becomes crushing taken together. Time spent in front of the computer eats into time in the field.
The support system shows the absurdity: in France, past the age of 40, you have access to only 9% of the public aid for setting up. Your previous professional experience? Your maturity? Of no importance next to the age criterion.
Some simplification is emerging: single points of contact are appearing. Software such as PermaTechnics structures the planning and lightens the paperwork. But the system as a whole is still designed for farms with administrative staff, not for one market gardener working three hectares alone.
Looking at the reality plainly
These five causes of failure intertwine and amplify each other. The lack of profitability makes it impossible to hire and lighten the workload. Exhaustion makes administrative management chaotic. Climate uncertainty makes the financial position more precarious.
Systemic solutions, an overhaul of the CAP, recognition of the physical toll, support adapted to small holdings, are largely an illusion in the current political context. The urgency usually lies elsewhere in public priorities.
Some find survival strategies: deliberately limiting their size, sharing equipment, diversifying into processing. These approaches work but they call for energy that not everyone has.
Local market gardening has a future, because we will always need to feed ourselves, but the current model is failing. While we wait for hypothetical deep change, each of us does what we can.
At PermaTechnics, we try to lighten the organisational burden in order to free up time and mental energy. It is modest next to the scale of the challenges, but it is our concrete contribution.