In the Shadow of Mad Cow Disease: How a César Award-Winning Film Depicts the Plight of Smallholders

One of the most significant stories from Europe recently has been the wave of farmers taking to the streets across the continent to protest EU trade and land management policies, with France serving as the epicentre of the demonstrations.

According to leaders of the major French farming unions spearheading the protests, this year’s extreme weather and rising production costs have placed a heavy strain on growers. Yet under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, farmers are required to keep at least four per cent of their land fallow.

Those opting not to let fields lie fallow must instead dedicate seven per cent to nitrogen-fixing or cover crops (typically sown after the main harvest to prevent crop fatigue and soil degradation), aimed at restoring fertility and biodiversity. The protesting farmers insist they can no longer absorb the drop in income caused by reduced cultivation, leaving many unable to make ends meet.

● French farmers block a motorway junction with tractors in protest. The green French text literally translates to “Do not import products banned in France.” It is believed to refer to the EU–Mercosur trade agreement currently under negotiation. Image source: Reuters

Another concern for the protesters is the EU’s ongoing agricultural import negotiations with South America. European farmers fear this will further drive down prices for their produce.

This is not the first time European farmers have taken to the streets over economic hardship. Over the past few years, similar protests have erupted repeatedly, highlighting the layered contradictions farmers face—free trade pushes down agricultural prices, compelling producers to scale up to cut costs, yet this only piles on heavier debt and environmental strain.

By chance, I recently came across the 2017 César Award-winning film 《Petit Paysan》（Petit Paysan）. The film turns its lens to an ordinary French family farm, chronicling farmer Pierre’s struggle to cope with mad cow disease, which serves as a poignant mirror to the history unfolding today.

●The film’s original French title, Petit Paysan, translates to “small farmer,” but in certain contexts can also carry the connotation of “country bumpkin.” This subtly derogatory label indirectly underscores the neglect and inequity that small-scale farmers have faced under mainstream agricultural policy.

I. Dreaming of Cows

Pierre, the film’s protagonist, is a smallholder farmer who has inherited more than twenty dairy cows from his parents. Each day he shuttles between the farm and his parents’ house, devoting every ounce of his energy to tending the herd.

The film opens with Pierre’s dream, in which he struggles to pick his way through the cattle, checking each animal’s condition one by one. When he finally retreats to the kitchen for a coffee and a moment’s rest, a few cows still linger close by. The herd is omnipresent, infiltrating every corner of his existence, blurring the lines between the working fields and his private sanctuary.

● Pierre’s dream. Swann Arlaud, who portrays Pierre in *The Farmer*, also appeared in *Anatomy of a Fall*, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which opens in mainland China today.

When Pierre wakes, he begins his day, falling into the same repetitive routine: in the evening he turns the herd out onto the pasture to graze, and in the morning he brings them back for feeding and milking, before they are turned out for another walk.

One day, Pierre notices one of his cows exhibiting symptoms of mad cow disease. A quick internet search reveals the government’s uncompromising stance: err on the side of extreme caution, for it is better to cull a thousand than risk missing a single case. Should an infected animal be found on a farm, every cow is condemned to slaughter.

To shield his herd, Pierre resorts to a series of drastic measures. His struggle lays bare the psychology of the smallholder and the micro-social environment he navigates, painting a quietly thought-provoking portrait of rural life.

II. The Sick Cattle

In literature and film, portrayals of the relationship between farmers and livestock typically fall into two stereotypes. One romanticises the farmer’s attachment to their animals, while the other underscores the cold ruthlessness of industrial agriculture towards them. *The Small Farmer* delves into far more nuanced territory.

● Upton Sinclair’s *The Jungle* starkly illustrates the callous treatment of animals in industrial livestock farming, as well as the grim working and production conditions inside slaughterhouses. The image on the left depicts a Chicago slaughterhouse from the early twentieth century. Source: web

Pierre held a deep affection for his dairy cows. He gave each one a name, and when speaking of them, he invariably referred to them as “my girls”.

He was exceptionally attuned to the physical condition of his herd, a sensitivity born of his intimate familiarity and care for them. This allowed him to detect anomalies in their health long before other animal health inspectors.

During a routine inspection, Pierre voiced his concerns to Pascale (his sister, a veterinarian) about the wellbeing of a cow named Topaze, fearing she might be falling ill. Although the vet found no signs of disease in Topaze’s initial stages, Pierre trusted his intuition and insisted something was wrong.

He proved to be right. Three days later, the cow exhibited symptoms of mad cow disease.

Yet, once the infection was confirmed and began to spread, he did not hesitate to slaughter and bury the afflicted animal. He even briefly considered concealing the herd’s medical history and selling off the remaining cows to another farmer to recoup his financial losses.

Pierre’s bond with his cows encompassed both an ethical coexistence and an economic symbiosis—the latter underpinning the former. When survival is threatened, moral obligations quickly falter. It sounds little different from the nature of human relationships.

III. Slaughtering the Cows

The events surrounding Pierre reveal that farm life is far from a pastoral idyll; the reach of modern management techniques in agriculture is pervasive.

As the film explains, the French Ministry of Agriculture routinely monitors milk quality across farms. Key indicators for assessment include fat content and the somatic cell count in raw milk.

Every cow on every farm is registered with veterinary services, assigned a unique identification number, and strictly tracked so that no animal can appear or vanish without a trace. Every birth, illness, death, and transfer must be reported to the authorities.

When Pierre attempts to conceal the slaughter of the sick cow, he lies to the animal health officials, claiming the animal went missing. Yet the situation spirals out of control, eventually drawing in the police, who demand Pierre account for the cow’s whereabouts. This underscores the stringent nature of the EU’s animal management protocols.

This regulatory mindset is not confined to the government; it is also embraced by Pierre’s own family, notably his sister Pascal. Working as a vet, when she learns her brother has secretly killed a sick cow, she warns him that while she can turn a blind eye this time, if another sick cow turns up, she will report it to the authorities immediately.

I had initially expected Pascal to value personal loyalty over the law, siding with her brother to help him save his herd. In truth, however, her position mirrors that of the authorities exactly—any confirmed case means a complete cull. It reveals just how deeply the rationale behind official measures has taken root.

IV. Stealing Cattle

The film also captures the tension between small-scale farmers and industrial agriculture.

In the narrative, to evade the police investigation into the missing cow, Pierre ventures out in the dead of night to his friend Fabrice’s highly automated industrial farm, where he secretly leads a cow back.

● Pierre steals a cow from a friend’s automated farm to pass it off as one that has died.

Where Pierre makes do with just two small barns, Fabrice’s modern cattle farm covers the area of a football pitch. Kept brightly lit even at night, it houses hundreds of cattle in neat, orderly rows. The operations rely so heavily on automation that Pierre can walk unimpeded into the middle of the herd without being noticed.

When Fabrice discovers a cow is missing, he files a police report but remains largely unfazed. Questioned by animal health inspectors as to why he appears so unconcerned about the loss, he explains that people are often unaccustomed to, or simply dislike, new technology. He notes that some would prefer not to see a farm run this way, and he can understand their reservations.

These few remarks alone sketch out a simmering conflict within a rural community, alongside the almost instinctive distrust small farmers harbour towards modern cattle operations.

On one occasion, while out hunting with friends, Fabrice takes out his phone and rather smugly shows off the farm’s “high-tech” kit to the group, claiming the machines can monitor every metric for the herd, recording daily milk yield, quality, and cell counts.

● Left: Fabrice showing off his “high-tech” setup to Pierre. Right: Pierre standing before the automated milking equipment, preparing to steal a cow.

Pierre, utterly dismissive, fired back: “Well, does it tell you whether your cows are happy?”

Fabrice completely missed Pierre’s point. Confidently, he insisted that if a cow fell ill, the machinery would certainly alert him; after all, the entire system had been imported from the Netherlands.

Which approach is truly superior: smallholder farming or modern intensive cattle operations? The director never lays it out explicitly, yet deftly reveals his own leanings throughout the film.

In routine milk quality assays carried out by the French Ministry of Agriculture, Pierre consistently tops the local charts, earning him the moniker “Prince of the Dairy Herds”. Fabrice, by contrast, manages a meagre forty-second place. Little wonder, then, that local smallholders remain deeply sceptical of these fully automated setups and the substantial capital outlay they require.

V. Mad Cow

While the film remains fixated on Pierre’s psychological turmoil, the wider context of smallholders eking out a precarious existence under the EU’s free trade framework is also subtly threaded throughout.

Throughout the narrative, Pierre’s key insight into the mad cow disease crisis comes via a Belgian farmer. After spotting the first case, this farmer promptly alerted the veterinary authorities, hoping for a practical response. Instead, the department handed down an immediate culling order for the entire herd. By the day following the diagnosis, the farmer had lost every single cow.

Although the government pledged financial compensation, he waited months in silence. Growing desperate, he uploaded a video online detailing his plight, announcing he would throw his support behind a radical political faction.

This subplot is scarcely distinguishable from contemporary reality.

● Satirical commentary from the American public on the Department of Agriculture’s measures to tackle mad cow disease: “Mandatory testing” – far too costly; “Keep a positive outlook” – a major outbreak will certainly not materialise; “Prayer” – recommended before every meal.

Across Europe and North America, measures to tackle mad cow disease have consistently avoided undermining the interests of the agribusiness sector. Traceability systems were slow to be implemented, governments could not shoulder the cost of comprehensive testing, and once cases were confirmed, the response was invariably mass culling, with virtually no concern for the financial ruin of farming families.

*The Little Farmer* may not have set out to pinpoint the root causes of the mad cow disease epidemic. Yet it is worth remembering that the origins of BSE in the UK during the 1980s are widely attributed to the use in industrial animal feed of meat-and-bone meal derived fromruminants.

When industrial farming is the norm and public health safeguards are woefully absent, it is fundamentally unjust to expect individual smallholders to bear the brunt of the fallout.

During the 2001 BSE outbreak in Europe, Irish media reported that local farmers were calling on the government to provide greater financial compensation.

Between 2003 and 2007, a BSE outbreak in Canada severely disrupted farmers’ livelihoods. Cattle producers from that period took the Canadian government to court, arguing that inadequate biosecurity measures had facilitated the domestic spread of the disease and demanding financial redress. The legal battle lasted until 2022, when the farmers’ claims were ultimately dismissed.

Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, farmers grappling with economic precarity have increasingly become the electoral battleground for anti-globalisation, far-right parties advocatingpopulistagendas. This underscores how industrial agriculture and globalisation have profoundly reshaped rural communities, weaving together complex social contradictions for which there are no easy remedies.

VI. What Does It Mean to Be a Farmer?

For Hubert Charuel, director of *The Little Farmer*, the narrative is drawn from deeply personal memories. His parents were dairy farmers who weathered the mad cow disease crisis, an experience that left an indelible mark on him as a teenager. The film was also shot on his family’s own farm.

Yet it is this unassuming family drama that secured a Best Film nomination at the César Awards, while actor Swann Arlaud took home the Best Actor prize. This success stems not only from its cinematography and performances, but also from its keen reflection of pressing social realities.

The parallels extend further: the director of *The Milk System* (*Das System Milch*), also released that year, was raised on a dairy farm. His documentary offers a more systematic examination of the social and environmental toll wrought by Europe’s dairy sector.

● Posters for *The Little Farmer* and *The Milk System*.

In *The Milk System*, the filmmaker maps out Europe’s dairy production chain in full, while examining the deeply asymmetric power dynamics between corporate capital and individual producers.

The documentary portrays farmers driven to harsher treatment of animals. Driven by the need to tightly control operational costs, any non-lactating cattle—including newborn bull calves—must be culled immediately to conserve feed. An even greater logistical headache is waste management: with no viable infrastructure to process the relentless stream of manure produced by large-scale operations, farmers are forced to dump it on-site, choking the soil.

Once a farmer commits to the industrialisation pathway, they are locked into a cycle of perpetual expansion to drive down costs. Did Fabrice, the character in *The Little Farmer* who embraces this route, already foresee this inevitable outcome?

Dairy production is already in surplus, a situation welcomed by the large agribusinesses that buy the milk. They leverage the oversupply to suppress purchase prices, bolster the supposed “global competitiveness” of their products, and flood markets worldwide, ultimately threatening the livelihoods of local producers.

Within the machinery of industrial agriculture and corporate food empires, producers, animals, and the land itself are pushed to the brink, teetering on collapse. The palpable anxiety of Pierre in *The Little Farmer* vividly captures this precarious existence.

So where, then, does the way forward lie for farmers?

Foodthink Author

Shumeng Li

A PhD in Sociology from Cornell University in the US and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Asian Affairs, National University of Singapore. Her research primarily focuses on value distribution in food production and the ethics of consumption.

All images in this article are sourced from the internet unless otherwise stated.

Editor: Zeen