Les cinquante ans qui ont changé l'agriculture française

The fifty years which transformed french agriculture - In 1950, one-third of French employed persons worked in agriculture, only one among 22 nowadays, and farmers are less numerous than manufacturing industry workers in rural areas. Agricultural holdings remain family units, but their average area has become more than three times larger in fifty years. Over the same period, productivity gains, mainly due to the development of machinery, have been considerable. Agricultural output is more than twice higher, allowing France to become net exporter of agricultural products. This performance improvement leads to an upward trend in the purchasing power of gross individual income despite the sharp decrease of real output prices.