In Brussels, an urban agriculture initiative bears fruit
In the Belgian capital, the Graines de Paysans association provides space and time for those who want to start market gardening, flower growing or making herbal teas. The aim is to encourage fresh passion for a difficult profession, and promote sustainability and localism.
In the Brussels-Capital region, Belgium
“I’ll just go and get some tomatoes from the greenhouse and then I’ll be right over”. With her hands still in the soil, Barbara Garbarczyk puts her August planting on pause to collect a few ingredients for her lunch. Behind her, in the distance, a few buildings poke their heads above the surrounding trees and vegetation. The Brussels-based farmer is now into her second season of market gardening at the Graines de Paysans agricultural test area in Brussels. “We have between 15 to 30 acres each, and I grow around forty vegetables that I sell by the basket in a bar in Schaerbeek” (a municipality in northern Brussels).
Cucumbers, tomatoes, cauliflower, lettuce, courgettes, beans… These are just a few of the vegetables available to consumers, generally from Brussels, during the summer season. As part of the programme, Barbara has free access to an outdoor planting area, as well as another planting area in the greenhouses for fruit and vegetables that are more sensitive to sudden changes in temperature. On an almost daily basis she cultivates and harvests her plants, sometimes helped by volunteers who have come to lend a hand.
A little further on, Brigitte Grandjean is busy harvesting. For this herbalist, the kings and queens of the garden are the plants and flowers. “I think it’s great to be able to make your own herbal teas from wild plants, so I decided to take a course in herbal tea making to learn about their specific virtues and how to grow them.”
Once the plants have been picked, they are dehydrated in the dryer, packed in sachets and sold in various shops in the Belgian capital. This is Brigitte’s third year of farming in the agricultural test area. “At first, I was inexperienced. It was my first time setting up a business”, Brigitte recalls. “But I had help from Graines de Paysans to get off to a good start. We’re well looked after and welcomed.”
Encouraging agriculture in Brussels
“The advantage of the test area is that we have access to the land, all the infrastructure and the irrigation system. A lot of things are already in place. On the other hand, we have to buy all the small equipment, the tarps and crop covers, and basic tools. It can cost several thousand euro”. Barbara is seated in the small kitchen next to the fields, cutting her freshly harvested cherry tomatoes. For a period of three years, the Graines de Paysans farmers can grow crops on their allotted land to try out market gardening or herbal tea production.
The idea of developing an urban agriculture project emerged around 2014. “We felt that there was demand in Brussels for giving people the chance to break into the business of agricultural production, particularly market gardening. We went looking for the municipality with the most land in the city, which happens to be Anderlecht”, explains Gabriele Annicchiarico, Graines de Paysans’ administrative and financial coordinator.
This led to the creation of the BoerenBruxselPaysans consortium (“boeren” means “farmers” in Flemish, the second official language in Brussels). The ambition of this consortium is to “encourage the transition of the Brussels-Capital Region towards sustainable food systems”, with the help of several urban agriculture projects including Graines de Paysans. Supported by Bruxelles Environnement, the regional body responsible for environmental and energy issues, BoerenBruxselPaysans receives assistance from the European Union as part of the 2014-2020 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) programme.
Since 2016, the Graines de Paysans project has been attached to the non-profit association Le Début des Haricots, which supports a number of agricultural projects in Brussels. Although the European funding has come to an end, the work of Graines de Paysans continues with the help of various backers, including the Brussels Region and the Municipality of Anderlecht (south-west of the Brussels metropolitan area).
“In Brussels, there’s a well-developed support system for producers. There are still a few things that need improving. But on the whole, we have good support at every stage, from conception to selling”, says Francisco Dávila, a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles’s agro-ecology laboratory, and a contributor to the ERDF-funded L[ag]UM urban agriculture project.
Graines de Paysans is also part of the Good Food strategy, a public policy developed by Bruxelles Environnement, which aims to improve access to local food for the people of Brussels. Since 2016, the test area has welcomed around twenty farmers. Each year, a call for projects invites anyone who wants to get into the business and has a production project to apply.
A difficult profession
“We tend to say that the test is real, because you have to produce and sell from the first year. But the ground is solid, because you don’t have to make the investments that are necessary to launch a business,” explains Gabriele Annicchiarico. “What we are trying to do is remove the two main obstacles to starting up a business, which are access to land and access to the means of production and capital. But we are also aware that these two obstacles are just deferred until later, when the people have to set up their business.”
According to Francisco Dávila, Brussels farmers face a number of difficulties. The first is training, which is not always easy to access, yet is essential for new farmers. “Most Brussels producers are nimaculteurs, meaning farmers who don’t come from an agricultural background. They are not people whose fathers were farmers and who have inherited the farm. We’re talking about people who are retraining for a new career, who come into the business with a strong set of values, but who may lack practical and technical experience”. This is the case for Barbara Garbarczyk and Brigitte Grandjean, who both took training courses to learn the profession. The Graines de Paysans test area allows them to put their newly-acquired knowledge into practice while testing the production process.
But the most pressing difficulty is access to land. Once the test phase is over, farmers have to find a place of their own. “This just shifts the land problem. You’ve finished, you’ve been trained, you’re good, and now where are you going to grow your crops? People say that there’s nowhere in Brussels to grow crops. This is both true and false. I think that if all the local and regional authorities took political action, more land could be made available for growing crops,” argues Francisco Dávila.
Between 2016 and 2018, the non-profit organisation Terre-en-vue mapped the agricultural and potentially usable land in the Brussels-Capital Region. In the most pessimistic scenario, it is estimated that 161 hectares of land could be mobilised for such purposes, while in the most optimistic scenario 277 hectares could be mobilised. Anderlecht is one of the municipalities with the most land that could be mobilised, ranging from 36.9 hectares to 62.3 hectares, depending on the scenario.
“Of the people who have come to the end of their time in the Graines de Paysans test area, we can say that half of them continue their business while the other half stop,” explains Gabriele Annicchiarico. In addition to the constraints involving training, land and financial investment, farmers also have to juggle a job that requires many hours of work. “There are times when I manage to not work so much at the weekend, at least not in the field,” says Barbara Garbarczyk. “But I remember periods when there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t work, including evenings, because there’s also the whole administrative side of things.”
Brigitte Grandjean, who is coming to the end of her three-year trial, plans to extend her stay for a further two years, which is possible in certain cases. At the end of these two years, she is not sure whether she will be able to maintain her activity in Brussels. “I’m not producing a great amount, and I don’t know whether moving to another plot would make me genuinely profitable,” she says. “I’m not looking for a big plot, but I’d still have to build a dryer and a storage shed.” Parallel to farming, Brigitte also has another job that provides her with economic security.
For her part, Barbara Garbarczyk has found a plot of municipal land near the town of Namur (further south, in Wallonia). Next year, she plans to join forces with four other farmers: market gardeners, herbal tea makers and goat and sheep breeders. “We’re going to set up a cooperative and raise funds, then we hope to benefit from certain regional support mechanisms that provide capital or very low-interest loans. We’re also hoping to obtain backing from foundations that align with our ethical framework.”
Agriculture, a vector for socio-professional integration
Opposite the Graines de Paysans kitchen, two men are shelling peas. Guillaume Goor and Daniel Kmail are both members of Biotiful, a market gardening and eco-gardening project run by the Mission Locale of Saint-Gilles (in the south-central part of the Brussels Region), which aims to train jobseekers to become farmers. Set up in 2018 on Graines de Paysans land, the project offers work contracts lasting between one and two years, enabling disadvantaged locals to train for the field. “There are several types of contract, aimed at people who don’t have a diploma or whose diploma is not recognised in Belgium“, explains Guillaume Goor, who coordinates the project.
Daniel Kmail has been working with Biotiful for four years. He was the first to sign up and the only employee with a permanent contract. Originally from Palestine, he was already working in agriculture before coming to Brussels: “I was looking for the same job I was doing before. When I registered with Actiris, they referred me to Guillaume.” When he first joined the project, Daniel had to get used to Biotiful’s production methods, which are a far cry from intensive farming techniques. “It’s completely different from the big companies. Here, we have to do almost everything by hand”, Daniel explains while weighing the shelled peas. Like most of the fruit and vegetables grown at Biotiful, these peas will be delivered to a restaurant in the town.
The project currently employs twelve farm workers. According to Guillaume, by the end of their contract with Biotiful around two-thirds of the employees will find work in the sustainable food sector, as gardeners, sellers or kitchen workers. Few, however, will continue to work in market gardening, due to a lack of opportunities.
Graines de Paysans is currently setting up a new site where farmers can stay for the long term, if their trial period is successful. The organisation also wants to work on farm transfers, to enable new farmers to take over farms that have no family buyers. As Gabriele Annicchiarico says, “the thing we’re trying to do is innovate and ensure that people who want to get into these professions, which are genuinely great but problematic when it comes to economic viability, are supported and helped. Because this sector is one we all need.”