Video from group n°029

Welcome to the webpage of group 029

The topic we have decided to explore is the following :
We studied the difficulty of access to healthy and local food for people who lives in the cities. We decided to study one particular product which can be easily accessible for everyone: eggs.

Our paper

LILLE AUX ŒUFS

The creation of our project is coming from two different conclusions: The world population had triple in sixty years so there are always more and more people to feed, and those people tend to live in the cities and less in the rural areas. So, reinventing our way to produce our food is very challenging but essential to our survival.

Indeed, the story of our agriculture is to be rewritten and this goes thru the relocalisation of our food industry and thru a less sectorial but more territorial politic. This means creating a closer relationship between consumers and producers to help the population to re-appropriate the food industry that she depends on. But it also means allowing territories to do whatever it can to provide to its needs. Yet, since fifty years, the food industry has been pushed in the opposite direction: the supply chains are longer and longer, governments are obsessed by international markets, companies are always bigger and more concentrated… For many experts, the first step to start making a change is to relocate or agriculture.

To understand how we can “relocate our agriculture” we decided to meet Jean Louis Poullion, the director of an organic and social farm in the periphery of Lille in Villeneuve d’Asq. Meeting Jean Louis was the occasion for use to ask him all the questions we had about local and organic agriculture and have a professional opinion about our project “Lille aux oeufs”. Jean Louis explained us his activity, the business model of Les jardins de cocagne, the problems and challenges he meets every day on his farm, how he perceive from his farm the current change in consumption, but also his plans for the future. Jean Louis also gave us a tour of the farm, explained us what plant was growing where and even made us try some vegetables!

Now that we had a better idea of how an organic, local and social farm was working, we wanted to focus more on the essence of our project “Lille aux oeufs” which is based on a basic product that we consume every day and which is producible everywhere: the eggs. The concept of Lille aux oeuf is to create urban henhouses in strategical points of Lille to allow citizens to have access to fresh and local eggs every day. As the goal of the project is also to reconnect people with what they eat, every person who wants to beneficiate from this project would have to give his green waists to feed the chickens and to give a little bit of his time every month to take care of the henhouse. Those kind of henhouses already exist in many big cities: New York, San Francisco, Munich and …. Roubaix.

To have a better idea of how this kind of project could work, what are the juridical approaches and the technical issues generated by chickens living in the city (as Business School students, we have no idea about this!) We went to the ADEP (Association pour le Development de l’Education Permanente) of Roubaix, to meet Myriam Maerten the director of the institution. Inside the local of the association, they implemented a henhouse, with approximately 30 hens. They are in the courtyard of the ADEP, which is in the middle of Roubaix. And they made an activity, open to all the inhabitants of Roubaix. People could come and learn to take care of one or two hens, what was the benefits of having a hen in your own courtyard, for example having fresh eggs almost every day. After this course, the hens were sold with an adequate henhouse. After a few weeks, ADEP only had 5 hens left. This activity had kind of a success which shows that people are interested by this field.

In conclusion we can say that this project seems to be interessant for the two experts we have met. The project would certainly attract people