FEVE: Accelerating the agro-ecological transition and offering sustainable investment
FEVE – ‘Fermes En Vie’ or ‘Farms Alive’ in English – is a French startup that promotes sustainable agriculture by acting as an intermediary in the takeover and ecological conversion of farms. It also offers investors the opportunity to build up capital while acting to maintain economic activity in the countryside.
FEVE – ‘Fermes En Vie’ or ‘Farms Alive’ in English – is a French startup that promotes sustainable agriculture by acting as an intermediary in the takeover and ecological conversion of farms. It also offers investors the opportunity to build up capital while acting to maintain economic activity in the countryside. Vincent Kraus, Co-Founder and Head of Collection for the Real Estate Company, tells us more about it.
Can you introduce FEVE?
We are three founders (Marc Batty, Simon Bestel and Vincent Kraus) who have each already started a company in the past (Dataiku, Promus and Senioradom) and we found ourselves in 2020 with a common goal: to accelerate the agro-ecological transition. As half of France’s farmers will retire in the next 10 years, we decided to focus on enabling and encouraging new farmers to set up more sustainable and environmentally friendly farming projects.
Today we have 15 employees with a main office in Bordeaux where the company is located and a few people in Toulouse and Paris.
What services do you offer?
FEVE's objective is to facilitate agro-ecological projects. To do so, we have created a real estate company that buys farms that are then rented (with an option to buy) to project leaders who are committed to environmentally friendly projects. This real estate company is financed by citizens' savings, i.e. it is mainly individuals who invest in it to finance the acquisition of farms.
We therefore offer both a financing service to facilitate the creation and transfer of farms for farmers and a meaningful savings solution for individuals.
We have also created a digital platform with content and services to facilitate the process of setting up a farm (lagrange.feve.co) and thus improve the success rate of such projects.
Why do your customers need FEVE to transfer or take over a farm? Are the usual channels failing?
More and more, farms are being set up outside the family framework (by people who do not inherit a family farm). For these people, the land is very expensive to acquire, especially since they also have to finance everything related to the farm (materials, equipment, stock, etc.). It is therefore almost impossible for them to obtain a bank loan without a lot of personal contributions. Moreover, even if they could obtain a loan, the payment of rent to us is much lower than a loan repayment (interest plus capital), which allows them in the first years to reduce their expenses and to be able to use more funds to invest in their production tools and thus to reach economic viability more quickly.
How many farm takeover projects do you facilitate each year? And how many are currently online?
We have facilitated seven farm takeover projects since the first takeover in July 2021. The goal is to enable a dozen more takeovers this year and double that number by 2024. These are often long projects and we are currently working on both 2023 projects as well as projects that will reach fruition in 2024.
What is the typical profile of your investor clients?
Our investor clients are French, generally between 30 and 60 years old, with an average age of 43. They tend to live in the city.
They invest for three main reasons:
1. To give meaning (social and environmental) to their savings
2. To diversify their wealth by investing in a tangible asset that is historically not very volatile
3. Benefit from an income tax reduction (25% of the amount invested) which boosts the profitability of the investment.
Almost everyone is motivated by these three factors, but some will consider them more important than others.
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