Yannick Ogor is a livestock farmer and market gardener in Brittany. He was a member of the Confédération Paysanne (Peasant Confederation) and later left the organization. He has been involved in groups that fought against the microchipping of animals and against the administrative regulations that stifle farmers. He is the author of the book "Le paysan impossible" (The Impossible Farmer), in which he recounts the struggles of the agricultural world in France over the past sixty years, their attempts, and their dead ends. In a new publication, Yannick Ogor revisits the death of Jérôme Laronze, a livestock farmer in Saône-et-Loire, crushed by the agricultural administration and shot dead by police officers. Here is a transcript of some questions asked of Yannick [1].
In these times of pandemics in intensive livestock farming, how can we confront a system that claims to "protect populations" by eliminating farmers?
Non-cow disease (NCD) is a disease that affects only cows, characterized by nodules and fever. It is considered relatively mild and not transmissible to humans. What is surprising is the reaction of governments to a disease that is quite benign. We must examine the origins of these directives to manage this disease with such radical measures: the systematic culling of the entire herd.
This is not the first time this type of management has been applied; it has been used with sheep, chickens, ducks, and other livestock.
One can only be surprised by the scale of this agricultural movement, given that these practices are quite common. For the past ten years or so, the management of avian influenza in France has resulted in systematic culling as soon as an animal is diagnosed; this is not the case for all diseases, since, for example, bluetongue has not led to this type of culling. However, it is the case for tuberculosis and amyloidosis. This is why it is difficult to understand the rationale behind these culling measures, as they do not seem to be the obvious solution for containing all diseases. For example, with necrotizing fasciitis (NF), it is not contagious but vector-borne, as the disease is transmitted by biting insects. There is no systematic transmission pattern. Therefore, there would be a possibility of managing this disease completely differently by monitoring the animals and isolating them rather than culling them. And so, I feel compelled to join the farmers' mobilization, to express my outrage at such practices, which are completely unjustified. Especially since this disease, for the moment, has only minor effects.
Is the movement demanding vaccination?
When vaccines exist, the government tries to impose vaccination. For example, in 2000, bluetongue was mandatory, a requirement that agricultural protests at the time successfully challenged. Since then, this disease, which has resurfaced in France for the past two or three years, has led to mass vaccination campaigns. There is no longer a legal obligation, yet farmers vaccinate themselves, despite the known significant side effects. Similarly, when avian flu appeared in 2024, the government once again resorted to vaccination. All ducks were vaccinated, and the result today is that avian flu is spreading as if nothing had happened. Therefore, these issues of vaccination in livestock farming are, to say the least, questionable. What is surprising is that the agricultural sector as a whole, through its union representatives, is calling for vaccination. Yet, the herd that was slaughtered in the Doubs region was vaccinated. The unions found it absurd to slaughter a vaccinated herd (the animals should have been able to fight off the disease), but I haven't heard anyone question the vaccine. About fifteen years ago, a large minority of farmers doubted vaccination and the pharmaceutical interests behind it. Today, a few years after the COVID crisis, we see that the ideological groundwork has been laid and no one dares criticize vaccination anymore. It's deplorable! We must always consider the interests at stake in defending either systematic slaughter or vaccination.
What's at stake here is primarily the economic management of a health crisis; export licenses for affected countries are on the line! France decided on culling because-at the international level, where export licenses are managed based on health criteria-bluetongue disease (BT) is subject to an injunction from states to immediately eradicate the disease in order to maintain their trading permits. This isn't the case for all diseases; for bluetongue, one can lose their export license when the country is affected, but there is no systematic culling. In the case of BT, in order for agribusinesses to continue exporting to Italy, Spain, and North Africa, culling is imposed to avoid losing these markets.
Why are the Rural Coordination and Peasant Confederation unions calling for widespread vaccination of the herd?
As soon as a country vaccinates, it loses its accreditation because it's difficult to distinguish a vaccinated animal from a sick one. Except that we now know that with PCR tests, it's possible to make this distinction! Under these circumstances, what the CR (Coordination Rurale) and the Confédération Paysanne (Confédération des Amis du Producteurs) are asking for is that vaccination be implemented and that accreditations be reinstated on a country-by-country basis, which Italy and Switzerland have agreed to, and which still needs to be obtained from Spain. These unions are speaking with a forked tongue: on the one hand, they say that the responsibility for these diseases lies with international trade, which moves animals over thousands of kilometers and, in doing so, spreads diseases-so logically, this type of trade must stop; on the other hand, they are demanding sanitary measures that would allow this trade to continue. The political absurdity of this approach is clear. All these unions, along with the FNSEA, are in a real-politics mindset, and are not at all questioning the root causes of the development of these diseases.
What other solutions are there to combat diseases?
Here, I want to draw on the work of veterinarians who are part of the GIE Zone Verte (Groupement d'Interventions et d'Entraide), a cooperative of veterinarians who work with livestock to help farmers find treatment solutions that aren't entirely dependent on the pharmaceutical industry, particularly plant-based ones. There isn't that much long-term data on CND (Cowherb Disease), it only arrived in Europe a few years ago; it's better known in Africa. What they've observed by reading international studies on the subject is that immunity can be acquired quite easily because this virus doesn't mutate. What we know is that an animal that has been infected once will not be reinfected. So, it's possible for herds to acquire immunity. However, all the measures currently in place (slaughter or systematic vaccination) prevent this natural immunity process from occurring. We are constantly creating extremely costly situations: the slaughter requires hundreds of millions of euros to be paid out in compensation; the same applies to vaccination.
And yet, there are inexpensive solutions that don't rely on the industrial system. We've seen this with other diseases. Xavier Nouliane-a fellow farmer who wrote a book called "Ménage des champs" (Field Cleaning)-recounts his experience dealing with paratuberculosis, a disease that the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) considers an immediate eradication target. Normally, France mandates the total slaughter of infected herds. Nouliane, along with the GIE-Zone Verte (Green Zone Economic Interest Group), successfully lobbied the prefecture to prevent the slaughter and implement a treatment program, notably using plant-based remedies to boost the animals' immunity. He managed to eradicate the disease this way. So, there are alternative solutions, but unfortunately, they are rarely used and little known. It's a struggle! This group of farmers, along with the GIE-Zone Verte, are systematically denounced by the government as charlatans. That's false because real, in-depth work is being done. For example, with bluetongue, strengthening the natural immunity of ewes is far more effective than vaccination. Farmers know this; the number of vaccinated animals that end up getting sick demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these vaccines every day. Not to mention the side effects! Unfortunately, the unions prefer to promote this kind of simplistic solution and lull farmers into a false sense of security.
I find the recent agricultural movement very weak because it doesn't analyze these political choices. In particular, I haven't heard anyone denounce the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), formerly known as the OIE - the International Livestock Organisation. Their central role is to regulate global trade through health standards. It's there that decisions are made regarding which contagious diseases will be designated as notifiable diseases, obliging states to declare their presence, which then becomes a matter of immediate eradication. I find it incredible that the unions haven't denounced the interests at stake, namely the pharmaceutical companies and agribusinesses that export worldwide. They are the ones who create these standards to serve their own interests. The organization's headquarters is easily accessible; it's in Paris. No one has called for demonstrations in front of it, even though that's where all the decisions are made.
We are forced to join the agricultural anger being expressed against MERCOSUR and the liberalization of international trade. It promises a massive influx of beef from countries where production costs are lower, and it eliminates or drastically reduces customs duties that help to rebalance prices in the face of unfair competition. The stakes are enormous, but the unions are missing the point by not highlighting the new rules regulating international trade. Indeed, customs duties are being reduced almost everywhere, meaning that food can come from Ukraine and Brazil cheaply. But at the same time, other regulations are being reinstated, notably sanitary standards, which are these new customs barriers, often referred to as non-tariff barriers. It is this type of sanitary management that allows the global market to be regulated. The very least that the protesting unions could do is highlight and criticize this WHO Food Safety Act. This is where the types of health management are decided today around the world, and where opportunistic markets are created. When a disease strikes a country, like the swine fever outbreak in China a few years ago, the Chinese government was forced to cull more than half of its pig population. Consequently, this created a new market, which Breton agribusinesses greatly benefited from by massively exporting their pigs to China. Afterward, it was primarily the small farms that never recovered. In China, more than half of the farms were subsistence farms, and industrial pig farming was still in its infancy. Five years after the crisis, there are no more subsistence farms-they have been banned-and only mega-factories with hundreds of thousands of pigs remain. These are the ones that now capture the market share. Health management only benefits the industrial players who manage to create monopolies. During the pork crisis in China, large Breton farmers amassed extraordinary dividends. As long as the unions fail to denounce this type of management, which creates extraordinary rents and intensifies the development of the industrial model, they will only pretend to challenge the way the world is.
The FNSEA was not part of the latest agricultural movement at the beginning of 2026. Yet today, it is trying to capitalize on the anger by demanding a relaxation of pesticide standards.
This is the crux of the debate surrounding "mirror standards": either we require countries exporting their products to us to comply with our standards, to prevent unfair competition; or we lower our standards here to be competitive on the international market and allow for exports. It is this second option that the FNSEA and the Rural Coordination advocate.
What about small farmers in all of this?
There is no union, not even the Confédération Paysanne, that represents their voice, and very few independent movements are emerging in the agricultural world. A few years ago, we tried to create a movement we called "hors norme" (outside the norm), which specifically aimed to denounce the sham of management by standards that protect neither the consumer, nor the animals, nor the farmers. We didn't get any support. At the time, we mobilized to defend and show solidarity with farmers who had experienced slaughter on their farms for non-compliance with this or that standard, but we received no support. I'm thinking, of course, of Jérôme Laronze, an organic cattle farmer in Saône-et-Loire, who was killed by the police in 2017. This farmer was threatened with the slaughter of his herd for failing to comply with absurd traceability standards. He denounced the situation, wrote about it, tried to resist, and received no support from any union. Yet, Jérôme was the Confédération Paysanne's spokesperson at the time, and his union abandoned him. The day before the slaughter, Jérôme went into hiding to give the media time to denounce his situation. During those few days on the run, the Confédération Paysanne's co-spokesperson could think of nothing better to say to the press than that Jérôme's situation wasn't a political problem but a mental health issue. This shows just how little this union understood, or pretended not to understand, Jérôme Laronze's political denunciation of the French livestock health management practices.
The mobilization in January was very intense, with life-or-death stakes for a number of farmers involved. Along with the Confédération Paysanne (Farmers' Confederation), the Coordination Rurale (CR), generally considered far-right on the political spectrum, was very active. Banners were seen demanding "tanks in the housing projects, not against the farmers." What are your thoughts on the encounter between such different groups?
They share the common trait of being excluded from all the mechanisms of the FNSEA/State agricultural co-management that has persisted for decades. This gives them a kind of militant purity and prevents them from having been corrupted by dubious alliances with government agencies. The CR (Coordination Rurale) is made up of fairly prominent farmers seeking industrial development. It has won control of a few Chambers of Agriculture, and now we can see what it does with the money. We've witnessed rather mafia-like practices, particularly in the Southwest and Lot-et-Garonne. It's worth noting that CR employees have taken their board of directors to the labor court, demonstrating that the organization doesn't care about its employees. It's quite determined, as we saw during the mobilizations. I think its growth, in terms of membership, is based on a feeling of denigration and marginalization, which is real in the agricultural world because it is subjected to systematic criticism. I understand this resentment, because environmental criticisms aren't directed the same way at construction workers who use harmful products as they are at smartphone vendors, all of whom contribute to destroying this planet. From the "hicks" of the mid-20th century to the "bumpkins" of the 20th century, there's a denigration of the farmer that persists today. The CR (Coordination Rurale) feeds on this resentment without promising to free farmers from the oppression of large agribusinesses and the state, since these same people, by denouncing the regulations that prevent the use of pesticides, are essentially saying: "Let's be even more dependent on the large industrial groups that sell these pesticides." Nor does the CR say "Stop, let's stop being dependent on what's beyond our control." They continue to invest, pushing farmers into debt so they earn practically nothing in terms of income, but siphon off millions in revenue and investment without ever recouping the dividends. They don't question the absurdity of this ongoing investment. As long as there isn't a clear-eyed assessment of it, we're headed for disaster.
It's interesting to look at where this union comes from, how it has evolved, and why it has moved closer to the far right. In 1991, it was created around a protest against the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), not so far removed from the positions of the rural left, but with a more radical approach. These are truly disillusioned members of the FNSEA (National Federation of Farmers' Unions), entrenched in the capitalist agricultural economy, threatened with extinction by the changes brought about by the CAP. They rejected all forms of co-management, with a highly critical yet productivist discourse.
While the Confédération Paysanne (CFA) was trying to forge its own path by appropriating a more urban-oriented environmental critique, the CR (Coordination Rurale) did much to fuel resentment towards farmers who already feel marginalized and who, consequently, haven't embraced the rural left. As long as we don't critically examine environmentalism and the resentment it generates, those most directly affected will be more easily drawn to the CR and the far right. Yet, the absurdity of this union is evident at every level. In the Southwest, it's asking the Prefecture to regularize undocumented immigrants to compensate for a French workforce that, according to them, is useless. This is utterly cynical and, of course, doesn't preclude racism. We see here that the far right denounces immigration and, at the same time, as soon as it comes to power, as in Italy, regularizes en masse to provide cheap workers to industrial farms, factories... Behind this racism, there is realpolitik.
It would be foolish not to join the farmers' mobilizations because there are some crackpots in the CR (Coordination Rurale) who spout racist rhetoric. In Brittany, it was impossible to forge alliances with the CR because of the fierce clashes over water management. As a result, we weren't numerous enough. We have good reasons to be in the streets, and we'll work with the forces at hand. Let's see how far we can go in engaging with members of this union, trying to bring a class-based perspective to these mobilizations in order to honestly and truly dissect the bonds of dependence and entrapment in which we are currently trapped. This isn't about denouncing them as obstacles to free enterprise, nor is it about demanding more regulations supposedly to protect consumers and farmers. Rather, it's about examining precisely who decides on the application of these regulations, what their effects are, and recognizing that it's always the little guys who suffer. Many feel that we are witnessing the final days of a certain type of agriculture in France. The threat comes from the Chinese, Brazilian, or Canadian models, with their even more gigantic farms. The decline in the number of farmers is far from over. There are still 400,000 farmers left-which is already ridiculously low-and at the current rate, there will barely be 100,000 farmers in ten years.
Nadia M
Collective of Free Peasants
The farmers gathered within the "Free Farmers Collective" are demanding to be consulted, included, and have their expertise taken into account. They are tired of being manipulated by technocrats who impose their industrial or health-related vision on them through repressive measures. It is essential to listen to them and consider their questions and proposals. A large-scale study conducted by the Shift Project shows that more than 80% of farmers would like to adopt more sustainable agricultural practices and would be ready to embrace the ecological transition, provided they receive support. Here is a press release from the collective dated February 14, 2026.
Lump-stain disease in cows is a benign disease, with a mortality rate of 2%, and is not transmissible to humans. Until 2018, classified as category C, the management of this disease involved quarantining the animal for 28 days. Around fifty farmers chose to resist mandatory vaccination. They did so because they love and trust their animals and their natural immunity. They simply want to produce healthy food for consumers. The reclassification of lump-stain disease to category A has led to systematic and unjustified culling (more than 4,000 animals so far) and mandatory vaccination. The side effects of this vaccination are so severe (fever, loss of appetite, decreased milk production, necrosis at the injection site, symptoms identical to the disease, abortions, sudden deaths, etc.) that the government has established a public fund to compensate them. If the vaccine (attenuated virus) induces the disease, the herds must be slaughtered according to the protocol. Thus, despite their fear of the consequences, farmers are breaking their silence and gradually joining the collective, beginning to speak out. They are protesting against the new mandatory revaccination campaign.
The right to a fair trial is being trampled by the prefects who are ordering us to have the vaccination administered within 5 to 7 days, stating that if we contest the decision through legal action before the administrative court, it will have no suspensive effect on the vaccination. This is unprecedented and a serious violation of fundamental rights. We call on our elected officials, consumers, and the general public to support the farmers who are rejecting these arbitrary decisions and defending their right to choose in order to protect their animals, their expertise, and food sovereignty. Why are we prepared to lose everything? Because we feel responsible for what we feed our consumers.
Press release from the Free Farmers Collective of Burgundy, Savoie, and Franche-Comté in favor of freedom of vaccination of livestock
Notes
[1] This interview was conducted by l'actualité des luttes.info on FPP . You can find it under the date of January 8, 2026, and also listen to the interview with the "paysans libres" collective from March 23, 2026.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4703
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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