Cultivating together for ecological awakening
Discussion with Antoine Devins,
co-founder of La sauge
It's in the heart of Nantes' former MiN (Marché d'Intérêt National), in the Agronaute, that the La Sauge association has set up its plants, shrubs and other micro-thumbs. Founded 8 years ago in the Paris region by two friends, the idea is to raise awareness of the challenges of urban agriculture, reconnect with nature and cultivate know-how, while offering the general public the chance to learn about gardening and agriculture.
We took advantage of a volunteer day (every Tuesday and Thursday) to get our hands in the soil and talk to co-founder Antoine Devin.
La Sauge was created in Bobigny before moving to Nantes. How did the association's project come about?
It all started with a meeting between Sven and I, who are both passionate about urban agriculture. I'm an agricultural engineer, specializing in agroecology. In my last year of studies, I focused on urban agriculture, and I did a final-year internship in this field under the title of "the brakes and emergence of urban agriculture" in Paris. It was really interesting, and enabled me to meet a lot of people involved in the sector, but at the end of the internship, there was no job. I continued my studies in the same field, to keep on digging, despite the fact that there were no jobs to be had. I met Sven, who at the time was working at La ruche qui dit oui, and so was already involved in food and local life.
Little by little, we got closer, started gardening together, and found land to garden on. In fact, our first approach was to find spaces where we could garden, and invite our friends to come and garden too. So right from the start, we had a participative approach, passing on our know-how.
The idea was to create gardens in the city, with the aim of creating moments of conviviality, exchange and knowledge sharing, which we felt were essential. We both come from rural backgrounds, and we realized that our connection to nature was very different from that of city dwellers and most of our city-dwelling friends. We felt that this link to nature enabled us to be more in tune with our way of consuming, and we said to ourselves, we consume organic and local produce, why don't others?
That was our approach, and it still is today, to say to ourselves that if you have this link with nature, if you have this connection with the vegetable garden, with agriculture, with biodiversity, with the cycle of the seasons, you're perhaps better able to ask yourself questions about what's on your plate and to realize many things, whether it's the price, the seasons, the difficulty of accessing certain products and the impact that we have as consumers.
How did you turn it into a project?
We started gardening together, and soon realized that we needed space. After getting kicked out of our first plot, we realized that we needed to become a bit more professional to respond to the various calls for projects that were being launched. Structuring an association enabled us to put all the ideas we'd been exchanging in black and white. We had to write up the articles of association and think about how we wanted to be organized. It was a bit more organized than just a bunch of friends gardening together.
Going from that, to an association with a history and a raison d'être, changed the game when it came to approaching town halls for access to land. We simply had to be a little more serious. So, to begin with, we started looking for land. We created a wild garden on the Petite Ceinture and responded to a call for projects, which we lost. After six months, we were welcomed by the Grand Control, where we were able to plant our first gardens and discover that collective, participative and convivial gardening in a festive setting went rather well together. This gave us the inspiration to create urban farms that are both festive and recreational, with a strong cultural component and always a base of entertainment and education. And then, as a third block, we added agricultural production. All in all, these are the three activities we have at La Sauge today.
L'Agronaute is the second farm created by La Sauge. How did this project come about?
It was the City of Nantes, Samoa, CDC Habitat, Les Cinq ponts and the Les Eaux Vives association, who, in creating Les Cinq ponts, launched a call for projects to find an operator for the rooftop farms.
It came at exactly the right time, when I wanted to move to Nantes. We'd been thinking about leaving Paris, so it fitted in very well with my personal project. Sven and I were co-directors, he became general manager and I became regional manager of La Sauge Nantes.
We also now have three farms in Paris Bobigny, Aubervilliers and Saint-Denis.
How does the festive aspect appeal to your visitors?
Still, we have the feeling that a lot of people came on a volunteer day because they'd come to a party in the first place. In fact, and I'm convinced of this, that's how we became known.
When we created the Prairie du Canal, we started doing parties with Cracki Records. They'd fill the place to capacity, putting on 1,000 people. No matter what we said... It was very, very big.
We tried to do parties to get the place known. And then, from a purely economic point of view, to sell beer. That meant we could make cash straight away and develop other activities. On top of that, it brought us enormous notoriety. The general public got to know us through our events, so it's clearly a good means of communication.
When you set up La Sauge, were you also aware of what was happening elsewhere in France? Other urban agriculture projects?
There wasn't much to start with. Back then, everything was done in Paris. Of course, there were people doing urban agriculture elsewhere, but more in the form of semi-pro, pro, garden development. It grew little by little. The associations in Nantes, Nantes Ville Comestible and Beautiful, I don't know exactly how many years they've been going, but they must be like us. We got to know them because we created an event called "Les 48 heures de l'agriculture urbaine" (48 hours of urban agriculture), with the idea of getting all the towns in France to garden over a weekend at the same time. By launching this event, we began to connect with all the players in the provinces.
It was really in 2017 that we started to get to know the national network of urban agriculture players. Before that, it was really focused on the Paris region. Even if I think that even today, almost half of them must be in Paris. Now, there's an association that brings together all the professionals in the field, the AFAUP (Association Française d'Agriculture Urbaine Professionnelle), which will be 9 years old in February 2024.
Why is it so important for you to enable everyone to garden?
If we have to sum it up in one sentence, our aim is to raise awareness of the ecological transition we need to make, and that means gardening. But that's not all we do. On the whole, we want everyone to garden for two hours a week, and we want to encourage as many people as possible to take up an agricultural activity.
Then, all our actions go a little further than just getting people to garden, with, for example, cultural events to raise people's awareness of these themes. By attracting them through a concert and an evening, we find them in an urban farm, and so, perhaps come back to see either other events linked to this theme, or come and garden on volunteer days. On these days, there's garden maintenance where we're really into gardening. But in fact, when we're doing nursery work, we're involved in an agricultural activity. We're professionals, we're nurserymen. There's a lot of professional know-how involved, and so a very broad spectrum.
As to why we're doing this, the first thing to know is that we want to make as many people as possible aware of these issues. We're convinced that when people are made aware of these issues, they ask themselves the right questions, and awareness can be raised. We may also be able to influence the way we consume, especially in cities.
We're also interacting with the farming and rural world, trying to highlight it. There are a whole host of externalities that will, why not, encourage people to take up farming, for example, by being able to come and spend a day or two a week learning, practicing and really getting to grips with the world of agriculture. There's a pretty interesting alternative here, because you can take up 4/5 and come and do this just one day a week. Even if you're unemployed, you don't have to leave Nantes or your family. The next step would be to become a trainer.
How do you see these urban farms helping the ecological transition of cities more generally?
With regard to l'Agronaute, there are the activities I mentioned, but there's also the fact that we welcome 13 structures that are all players in the ecological transition, which is a bit of a specificity in Nantes that we don't have on our other farms.
These are all players who will either be testing out their professional model, and who are involved in the transition through their profession, or who are also involved in passing on their know-how and passing it on to as many people as possible. Their role is to raise awareness.
Appala, for example, is a low-tech association. It's a subject we don't touch at all, but we're obviously sensitive to it. They're going to run weekly bike repair workshops, or a big annual low-tech event, which is bound to raise awareness and reach out to people on these issues. That's why we have a direct impact on city dwellers, but not only. Do we reach people in the region? Maybe not the whole region, but certainly the metropolis.
From the Paris region, where you started, to today, have you seen the evolution in attendance and people's attraction to this?
That's always a very complicated question to answer, because I don't think so. It's just that, in the end, we've stopped growing. Has our structure grown because people are more and more interested in these subjects, or is it simply because we've become more professional as we've grown? Our offering has also grown. In other words, while at the outset we were just doing gardening with friends, now we have an educational offer that covers everything from nursery schools to old people's homes, and we work with associations that work with migrants, the socially excluded, disabled young people and young people who are failing at school.
We realize that by specializing in these audiences, there are plenty of associations that are very keen on this kind of content. The same goes for plants. I'm often asked whether Covid marked an evolution. In fact, the nursery at l'Agronaute was launched in 2020, the year of confinement. So, obviously, it was a great start for us, because people were staying at home, so it was a real boost. So we can't really know if that's what made things evolve.
But even if we'd had a season before, we really started the nursery trade in 2019, at the Prairie du Canal, and in 2020 in Nantes. So, in fact, we've only been in the business for 5 years. Year on year, we're making progress. It's really hard to stand back. Still, it was a success. In any case, people responded as soon as it opened. But in the end, in the 8 years of its existence, l'Agronaute is only 4 years old, with one year of Covid. It's very hard to draw conclusions over 4 years.
So what's the real reason why we're attracting so many people now? We've always had volunteers coming along, but this year, we're realizing that the quality of participation is brilliant. It's also thanks to Julie, who has put a lot of energy into developing this part of the event. Before, maybe we didn't take as much care of our volunteers. There were always some, but the quality of service wasn't coming back. And we think we know why. Because at the end of the day, you have to federate.
Our theme for this season's collection is "Better Together", to highlight the idea of the vital need to reconnect with nature, to reconcile human beings with the living world. What does this evoke for you?
It's absolutely essential for me, because clearly, that's what La Sauge is all about too. It's about bringing agriculture back to the city to reconnect, to get closer to it. This relationship with nature is essential. And I have the impression that I was nourished by it when I was younger. It created a vocation in me. I grew up south of Rennes, in a small village, and gradually moved closer to the city.
From high school onwards, I was in the city, but still living in the country, and then I met the city and thought it was great. I thought it would be incredible to be able to combine the two. In fact, all cities were created as a break with the farming and agricultural world, but also with nature. After all, I see the farming world as a natural space, when in fact it's not quite true. But then, they're already much closer to nature than city dwellers. There's a bit of a divide there, whereas I think there should be a bit more porosity between the two. Urban agriculture is a great tool for this. But now, with 8 years' hindsight, I have the feeling that it's not enough.
I want to go further. And whether that will happen with La Sauge or not, I don't know. But right now, I want to get people out of the city and into nature. Well, at least to connect with the agricultural world, but an agricultural world that respects living things, where nature takes up more space, because you have more trees, more biodiversity, less pseudo-natural spaces that have been shaped by man.
At the end of the day, it's people from the cities, including me, or lots of people I know, who have found it interesting to change the way they grew up in order to seek out something closer to nature than what we might have experienced as children or teenagers or whatever. And, incidentally, this often goes hand in hand with the change in people's career paths when they reach the age of 30 or whatever. The Terre de Liens association also noted that the new organic farmers who have been setting up all over France over the last ten years or so are mostly urban dwellers.
Antoine Devins
