It is true that French farmers aren’t always held in the highest regard, especially by people in countries such as the UK that don’t benefit from the large farming subsidies that France receives. But for the farmers themselves life isn’t always sunshine and champagne.

I was talking to a local farmer who predominantly makes his living from dairy cows, and he was explaining some of the challenges to me. Not surprisingly these stem from officialdom rather than troubles with cows.

The price that a farmer will receive for each litre of milk is set by bureaucrats in Brussels each year. Last year the price rose dramatically, and this year it has been cut by around 50%. Brussels play with prices like this in order to encourage or deter farmers from producing milk – if they want more milk to be produced they will raise the price, and vice versa.

The big problem is, to raise a herd of cows to a productive milk-producing state takes at least two-three years, it isn’t a tap that can be turned on and off.

So when Brussels say ‘the price is being cut by 50%’ what is a farmer to do? Get all his cows slaughtered? Ask them to please stop eating grass and producing so much milk? Likewise when Brussels increases the price, the farmer can’t say ‘OK, I’ll produce twice as much milk this week, that should meet demand nicely’.

If the farmer has stopped keeping dairy cows, then even increasing the price by a very large amount won’t affect this years output – it will just make the existing dairy farmers very rich.

By the time a new herd of cows is being productive Brussels will have changed the price another two or three times, each time in a completely unpredictable way.

Imagine if your employer told you each January how much you were to be paid for the coming 12 months – this year might be £60,000, next year could be £15,000 and so on – but you were on a fixed contract that meant you had to work for the company for at least the next five years. You wouldn’t do it, I think, unless you really loved the job, or couldn’t do anything else.

Demand for milk products must be pretty consistent from year to year, and the price in the shops will be more or less unchanged. The costs involved in producing milk will be pretty similar year on year as well – wages, cows, hay, vet bills, electricity…

…so presumably it is reasonably straightforward for someone to calculate how much it costs a moderately efficient farmer to produce a litre of milk, and to use that as a basis for the price paid to the farmer, with slight tweaking as necessary, and to set a price in advance for the next three or more years.

Another big issue that farmers have in France, and about which they protest loudly, is the large difference between the price they receive for their produce and the price that the same thing costs in the supermarket. I have no idea why this difference is so great – presumably either because of excessive profiteering by the supermarkets, or a consequence of the very high staff costs (social contributions) that have to be paid at each stage of the process from farmer to supermarket shelf.

(There are certainly issues with supermarkets having limited local competition and maintaining local monopolies, that helps them keep prices high, but that is a separate subject.)

Whatever the reason, I was pleased to see that some farmers are taking the initiative. I saw a news article in which the farmers themselves were selling chickens direct to the public. The farmer got significantly more for his chickens than normal and the consumer paid much less than the supermarket price. Everyone was smiling happily.

Of course this approach is more practical for a farmer raising chickens and ducks than for someone growing fields of wheat.

I dare say there are administrative hurdles to overcome, and it isn’t very practical for a Parisian office worker to pop to the local farm after work to pick up a couple of chicken legs for his barbecue, but the principle is very tempting, and I’d be very pleased to see a few more of the farms near us open their gates to the public while also charging reasonable prices.