In the Shadow of BSE: How Does a César Award-Winning Film Depict the Plight of Smallholders?

One of the most significant news stories from Europe in recent weeks is that farmers across the continent have taken to the streets in protest against EU trade and land management policies, with France at the heart of the unrest.

According to leaders of France’s principal farming unions behind this wave of protests, this year’s extreme weather and soaring production costs have placed a heavy burden on farmers. Yet under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), farmers are required to leave at least 4% of their land fallow.

Those who choose not to set land aside as fallow must instead dedicate 7% of their land to growing nitrogen-fixing crops or cover crops (typically planted after the main crop harvest to prevent the continuous cropping problem), restoring soil fertility and biodiversity. Protesting farmers have been vocal about their inability to absorb further income losses from reduced production, warning that they are already on the brink of operating at a loss.

● French farmers block motorway junctions with tractors in protest. The green French text reads, literally, “Don’t import products that are banned in France” — presumably referring to the EU–Mercosur trade agreement currently under negotiation. Image: Reuters

Another concern for protesters is the agricultural import negotiations currently under way between the EU and South America. European farmers fear these talks will drive agricultural prices even lower.

This is far from the first time European farmers have taken to the streets over economic pressure. In recent years, similar protests have become commonplace, highlighting the layered contradictions confronting farmers — free trade pushes down agricultural prices, forcing them to expand to cut costs, yet this only deepens debt and environmental burdens.

Coincidentally, just a few days ago I came across the 2017 César Award-winning film Petit Paysan. The film turns its lens on an ordinary French family farm, telling the story of farmer Pierre as he confronts BSE, and forming a striking contrast with the history unfolding right now.

● The film’s French title, *Petit Paysan*, literally means “smallholder”; in certain contexts it can also be rendered as “country folk” or “yokel”. This somewhat dismissive term reflects, in its own way, mainstream agricultural policy’s neglect of and injustice toward smallholders.

I. Cattle of Dreams

The film’s protagonist, Pierre, is a smallholder who inherited more than twenty cows from his parents. Every day he shuttles between his farm and his parents’ home, devoting all his energy to caring for the cattle.

The film opens with Pierre’s dream. In it, he struggles to push his way through the herd, examining each animal’s health. When he finally retreats to the kitchen to drink a coffee and rest, a few cows still cluster around him. Cattle are omnipresent — from the production space to his most private spaces, they occupy every corner of his life.

● Pierre’s dream. Swann Arlaud, who plays Pierre in Petit Paysan, also starred in the Palme d’Or-winning film Anatomy of a Fall, which goes on general release in mainland China today.

Once awake, Pierre begins his day’s work, repeating the same routine — the night before, he lets the cattle out to the pasture to wander and eat hay; the next morning, he leads the herd back, feeds them, milks them, then turns them out to graze again.

One day, Pierre notices that one of his cows is showing symptoms of BSE. He searches online and learns that the government’s stance on BSE is to cull a thousand in error rather than let a single case slip through — once a case is confirmed on a farm, every cow must be slaughtered.

To protect his cattle, Pierre takes a series of extreme measures. The farmer’s mindset and the micro-social environment his actions reveal are both deeply thought-provoking.

II. Sick Cattle

In literary and cinematic portrayals of the bond between farmers and livestock, two stereotypes tend to dominate. One romanticises the farmer’s affection for the animals; the other depicts industrial agriculture’s cold indifference toward them. Petit Paysan presents a far more nuanced spectrum.

● Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle vividly exposes industrial farming’s cold brutality toward animals and the appalling labour and production conditions in the slaughterhouses. The image on the left shows a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early twentieth century. Image: internet

Pierre is profoundly attached to his cows. He has named each one and always refers to them as “my girls”.

He is unusually attuned to their physical condition — a sensitivity born of familiarity and deep care — which enables him to spot irregularities long before any animal health inspector would.

One day during a routine inspection, Pierre raises his concerns with the veterinarian Pascale — his sister — about his cow Topaze, fearing she might be ill. Although no symptoms are detected at the very onset of Topaze’s illness, Pierre relies on his instinct to conclude that something is wrong.

He is proved right. Three days later, the cow begins showing BSE symptoms.

Yet once Pierre confirms the diagnosis and the disease starts to spread, he does not hesitate to slaughter the sick cow and bury the carcass. He even briefly entertains the idea of concealing the herd’s medical history and selling the remaining cows to another farmer to salvage his losses.

Between Pierre and his cows there exists both a moral coexistence and an economic symbiosis — the latter being the foundation of the former. When survival is threatened, moral responsibility begins to crumble. It sounds, in truth, not so very different from the relationships between people.

III. Cattle Slaughter

The chain of events surrounding Pierre makes clear that life on a farm is far from pastoral idyll — the encroachment of modern management technologies into agriculture is inescapable.

The film reveals that the French Ministry of Agriculture conducts regular milk quality inspections across farms. Butterfat content and somatic cell count in raw milk are key parameters in assessing quality.

Every cow on every farm is registered with the animal health authority, each bearing a unique identification number. No animal may appear or vanish without explanation; the birth, illness, and death of every cow must be reported to the government.

When Pierre tries to conceal the slaughter of the sick cow, he lies to the animal health inspectors, claiming the cow was lost. But the affair only grows — the police get involved too, demanding that Pierre account for the cow’s whereabouts, a telling sign of just how strictly the EU regulates animal management.

And it isn’t only the government that subscribes to this philosophy of oversight — Pierre’s own family share it. His sister Pascale, a veterinarian, tells him that having discovered he secretly slaughtered a sick cow, she will pretend not to know this time. But if another case is found, she will report it to the authorities without delay.

I had expected her to put family feeling above the law and help her brother protect the herd. In reality, her stance never wavers from that of the authorities: if a case is found, the whole herd must be culled. It speaks volumes about how deeply the legitimacy of official measures has taken root.

IV. Cattle Theft

The film also portrays the conflict between smallholders and industrial-scale agriculture.

In one scene, to deflect the police investigation into the missing cow, Pierre sneaks out in the dead of night to the automated mega-farm belonging to his friend Fabrice and quietly leads a cow back.

● Pierre steals a cow from his friend’s automated farm to pass off as the dead one.

Compared to Pierre’s two modest barns, Fabrice’s modern farm is the size of a football pitch, ablaze with lights even in the small hours. Hundreds of cows are penned together with military precision, and operations are so heavily automated that Pierre can walk brazenly among the herd without being noticed.

When Fabrice discovers a cow is missing, he does report it to the police but seems unfazed. When animal health inspectors ask why he is so nonchalant about losing a cow, he replies: “People aren’t used to — or don’t like — new technology. Some don’t want to see a farm run the way I run mine. I can understand that.”

In just a few sentences, a latent conflict within the rural community surfaces — along with smallholders’ near-instinctive distrust of modernised cattle operations.

On one occasion, while Pierre and his friends are out hunting, Fabrice pulls out his phone and boasts proudly to his peers about the “high-tech” kit at his farm, claiming the machines can read every data point on his cows — tracking daily milk yields, quality, and cell counts.

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

Pierre, thoroughly contemptuous, fires back: “Does it tell you whether your cows are happy?”

Fabrice doesn’t grasp what Pierre means. Confidently, he insists that if a cow is sick, the machine will tell him — after all, the equipment was imported from the Netherlands.

Between the smallholder and the modernised farm, which model of production is truly better? The director never states it outright, yet deftly reveals his leanings through the film.

In the French Ministry of Agriculture’s regular milk quality tests, Pierre consistently ranks first in the area, earning him the nickname “the Dairy Prince”. Fabrice, meanwhile, comes only forty-second — hardly surprising, then, that local smallholders are far from convinced by a full suite of automated equipment and the steep investment it demands.

V. Mad Cows

Although the film focuses throughout on Pierre’s psychological state, the broader backdrop of smallholders struggling to survive within the EU’s free-trade framework is never far from view.

One of Pierre’s key sources of information on BSE is a Belgian farmer. When this farmer discovers the first BSE case, he immediately notifies the animal health inspectors, hoping they will offer a containment strategy. Instead, the animal health authority effectively condemns the herd to death. By the day after the case is confirmed, the farmer has lost every one of his cattle.

Although the government promises some form of financial compensation, months pass without a single update. In desperation, he posts a video online recounting his ordeal and declares that he will turn to a politically extreme camp.

This subplot mirrors the present reality almost exactly.

● American folk satire mocking the Department of Agriculture’s suite of measures for combating BSE — for example: “Mandatory Testing”: too expensive; “Think Positive”: an epidemic will never erupt on a large scale; “Prayer”: recommended before every meal.

Not a single measure adopted by European or American governments to tackle BSE dared to challenge industry interests. Traceability systems were slow to materialise, governments proved unable to bear the cost of universal testing, and once a case appeared, the only recourse was wholesale culling — no one cared at all about the losses borne by farmers.

Petit Paysan perhaps does not set out to identify the root causes behind the BSE epidemic. But let us not forget that the origins of BSE in Britain in the 1980s are believed to be closely linked to the use of meat-and-bone meal and bones from ruminants in industrial farming feed.

With intensive farming running rampant and public animal disease control in abeyance, it is deeply unjust for individual smallholders to shoulder the losses.

When the BSE crisis struck Europe in 2001, an Irish news report noted that farmers in Ireland were calling on the government for greater compensation.

Between 2003 and 2007, Canada suffered an outbreak of BSE that dealt a devastating blow to farmers’ livelihoods. Every farmer who raised cattle during that period filed a claim against the Canadian government, arguing that inadequate disease control measures had allowed BSE to spread domestically and that farmers were entitled to financial compensation. The legal battle dragged on until 2022, when the farmers’ claims were ultimately dismissed.

Meanwhile, farmers across Europe and North America, buckled under survival pressures, are becoming a key constituency for the far right — parties espousing anti-globalisation and populism. This underscores the profound transformation that industrial agriculture and globalisation have wrought upon local social life, leaving a tangled web of contradictions and conflicts with no easy solutions.

VI. What Does It Mean to Farm?

For Petit Paysan’s director, Hubert Charuel, the story springs from deeply personal memories — his own parents were dairy farmers who lived through the BSE epidemic, an experience that left an indelible mark on him as a boy. The film itself was shot on the family farm.

Such a seemingly unremarkable family story not only earned a nomination for the César Award for Best Film that year, but also won its lead actor, Swann Arlaud, the César Award for Best Actor. Beyond the cinematography and performances, its resonance with pressing social issues played no small part.

By a curious coincidence, the director of the documentary Das System Milch, released the same year, also grew up on a dairy farm, and his film offers a more systematic examination of the social and environmental harms inflicted by the European dairy industry.

● Posters for Petit Paysan and Das System Milch.

In Das System Milch, the director seeks to lay bare the entire production chain of the European dairy industry and to examine the deeply unbalanced power relations between large capital and farming households.

The farmers the film depicts treat their animals with even greater brutality. Because farm inputs must be precisely controlled, cows that cannot produce milk — including newborn bull calves — are killed immediately to save on feed. Even more troublesome for farm owners is the disposal of cattle slurry: with no outlet capable of absorbing the relentless stream generated by large-scale operations, the slurry can only be buried on site, pushing the land past its breaking point.

Once a farmer sets out on the “track” of intensive farming, there is no option but to keep scaling up to bring down production costs. Did Fabrice, who chose that very path in Petit Paysan, foresee the outcome?

Dairy production is already in overcapacity. The large agribusinesses that buy raw milk welcome the surplus, which conveniently allows them to drive down farm-gate prices and boost the “global competitiveness” of their products — flooding every corner of the world with European dairy and undermining the livelihoods of local farmers.

Within the system of industrial farming and food empires, whether it is farmers, cows, or the land itself, all are groaning under an impossible burden, teetering on the brink. Pierre’s anxiety in Petit Paysan renders this precarious existence — as if treading on thin ice — viscerally real.

Where, then, is the way forward for farmers?

Foodthink Author

Li Shumeng

PhD in Sociology from Cornell University; Postdoctoral Researcher at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on value distribution in food production and the ethics of consumption.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are sourced from the internet.

Editor: Ze’en