Lisa Foffano
Business School Lausanne
Nadene Canning
Keep this story going! Share below!
Les Jardins de Chivrageon is a sustainable micro-farm created by Raphaël, a freshly graduated cook who is passionate about fruit and vegetables. With his business model, Raphaël banished the use of chemical products as well as mechanical engines preferring to control all stages of production from the seed to the plate. His objective is to teach people what to eat according to the season, encourage them to prepare and eat new or poorly exploited fruit and vegetables, and to provide them with healthier products.
Les jardins de Chivrageon is a sustainable and profitable micro farming business located in Aubonne, Switzerland.
When Raphaël explains why he chose this business model, he says: “In a regular supermarket, you can only find a maximum of 30 or 40 fruit and vegetable varieties. Here I will be offering people around 220 to 250.”
With his 1Hectare of land, Raphaël wants to reconcile people with “rare” product varieties.
“People always buy similar vegetables: potatoes, leeks, zucchini, carrots, etc. Here, I give them a chance to rediscover other varieties of products and I help them develop recipes to cook them.”
This year, he developed three different basket sizes: the small basket at 25CHF, the medium basket at 45CHF and the big basket at 65CHF.
In these baskets, Raphaël sells the seasonal fruit and vegetables his garden produces so there’s never a standard basket.
When people come to visit him, he likes to explain everything about the products they have in their baskets, he even puts in a little more and is always willing to change a product if the customer is really reluctant to try it.
Raphaël’s interest is not in growing his business as fast as possible, but rather to improve current farming techniques and “control everything from seed to plate.
Les Jardins de Chivrageon is an idea Raphaël first mentioned while he and his family were walking around a market.
At the time, Raphaël had just finished his internship at L’Arpège, a 3 Michelin star restaurant and was coming back to Switzerland.
In 2001 at L’Arpège, the french chef Alain Passard decided to serve products exclusively from his own vegetable gardens. For Raphaël this internship was a revelation.
“At L’Arpège in Paris, we received so many products, it was fascinating to see all the differences they had between them. I was amazed to see the lifecycle of a radish for example, you see it growing, evolving and if you collect them earlier or later there is a significant difference in the taste. All this product development makes it fascinating.“
When he came back to Switzerland, the idea was born. Moreover, he knew that his family owned a 1 Hectare field in front of the house and that this field was arable.
He started working for a restaurant in the Swiss mountains and came back every weekend to start testing his idea on 1200 square meters of land to see if his idea could become a business.
In parallel, Raphaël was reading many books about micro-farming which strengthened his idea of making it into a business.
“The moment I really got excited about turning this into reality was after I read Jean-Martin Fortier’s book The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming.
I was able to see that the amount of land I had was sufficient to make my business profitable.”
Jean-Martin Fortier is a Canadian farmer internationally known for his development of an economically-viable sustainable business model.
What he liked about this book is that there were numbers and figures explaining how and why it could work.
The other author who inspired him was Eliot Coleman, a pioneer of biological agriculture in North America who has reached an impressive productivity on small areas of land using almost no mechanization.
If you ever have a question about fruit or vegetables, you can ask Raphaël. This young man knows an impressive amount of information about agriculture.
“There’s a lot of planning work that needs to be done beforehand in farming. For example, if you plant cruciferous vegetables (e.g. broccoli, brussel sprouts,...) on your land, you need to wait at least 3 or 4 years before you can plant the same family of products. This means you need to plan well ahead in order not to stress and damage the land.”
The neighbouring farmers, along with other skeptics, came to discourage him to launch this business saying it would never work and he would never succeed.
Many Swiss farmers have only a few product varieties but on a much larger scale (30 Hectares on average) in order to have their products on big supermarket shelves.
The answer he has for them is the following:
“It’s not natural to have single crop farming, you need biodiversity. If you go into the woodlands, you will never find only one type of fauna or flora, there are sometimes so many you can’t even count them. This is how nature is, and therefore this is what we should respect if we want to have a normal ecosystem. I don’t remember the last time I bought vegetables from a supermarket as you always find the same things. To give you an example, I will have at least 6 or 7 carrot varieties that most people have never heard of.”
When I asked him about why he was doing this he said “to me, it’s common sense to respect the cycle of nature. Why do you find it normal to eat strawberries in winter? We have a mentality problem in our society and we should adapt to nature, not the opposite.”
This business model will not only respect product seasonality but also teach consumers to respect and enjoy it. “You cook what you can based on seasonal availability rather than what you want to.”
Raphaël orders most of his seeds from ProSpecieRara, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of genetic diversity of plants and animals in Switzerland.
This not only preserves threatened species, it also helps customers discover what different things nature has to offer.
Through this idea, Raphaël is contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals of responsible consumption and production (12), as well as life on land (15).
A lot of farmers treat their plants once they are sick and use strong chemicals to kill the diseases.“What I do is preventive treatment. I don’t wait for the plant to be sick, I rather help it to grow as strong as possible to avoid it becoming sick.”This is a bigger workload since he has developed a treatment following every plant's needs with non-chemical home-made preparations.
With this process, Raphaël contributes to a natural preservation of land, health and air through which chemicals can spread.
In addition to working in a clean environment, Raphaël pushes the idea further since he wants everything to be handmade which implies no use of mechanization on his land. He will soon be employing someone to help him with his farm and will be providing the best possible working conditions.
How?
“The United States are technologically more advanced with regards to manual farming material. It will be very expensive for me to get such tools but it’s what I need to follow my original idea.”
What struck me about Raphaël is his motivation, his wide smile and the passion he has about this project that could make you want to listen to him for hours.
Get stories of positive business innovations from around the world delivered right to your inbox.
Raphaël Getaz, Les Jardins de Chivrageon
