# Start-ups to decarbonize agriculture? Empirical elucidation of the promise of ecologization

Léo Magnin, Antoine Doré

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## To cite this version:

Léo Magnin, Antoine Doré. Start-ups to decarbonize agriculture? Empirical elucidation of the promise of ecologization. Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, 2024, 105 (1), pp.199-223. 10.1007/s41130-024-00213-0 . hal-04680496

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# Start-ups to decarbonize agriculture? Empirical elucidation of the promise of ecologization

## Abstract

At the intersection of the “digitalization” and the “climatization” of the agricultural sector grows a promise of the “decarbonization” of agriculture by “start-ups.” Based on a qualitative study (40 interviews, 9 days of observation, documentary analysis), this article is a contribution to the political sociology of this promise of ecologization by reconstructing its meaning (what does it signify?) and its implementation (what actors and practices are involved?). The study analyzes the bases of a narrative allying the political agendas of agricultural leadership and the executive branch of the French state. The focus on soil CO2 sequestration and the politicization of innovative “start-ups” converge on the promotion of economic solutions to global warming. The authors found the “start-ups” working on this “decarbonization” were quite diverse, but could be sorted into three types: innovative businesses seeking rapid growth, consultancy firms offering expertise without aims of growth, and administrative intermediaries. The latter, the most numerous and the least innovative, are invested in voluntary carbon markets, most commonly the “low-carbon label,” a public framework overseen by the Ministry of Ecological Transition. The promise of the decarbonization of agriculture through start-ups thus falls short, as the study documents an optional and partial greening of agriculture that is overseen by the state, implemented by private administrative service providers, and funded by businesses wishing to improve their carbon footprint.

Keywords: ecologization, start-up, agricultural policy, voluntary carbon market, intermediaries, greening

## Introduction

Briefly summed up, the current dynamic - set off, it's true, over a decade ago - bears the advent of a digitized and decarbonized agriculture. Agriculture would thus be a net contributor to the fight against climate change through agroecology, digitalization, and bio-economy. (Pouch and Raffray 2022)

In France, agriculture represents 1.6% of the GDP, and 19% of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the national strategy for carbon reduction developed by the Ministry of Ecological Transition (Stratégie Nationale Bas-Carbone, 2020), agricultural emissions should be reduced by 46% of 2015 levels by 2050. More broadly, since the late 2000s, agricultural policies have been undergoing a process of climatization (Hrabanski 2020), meaning a form of ecologization hinging on the mitigation of and adaptation to climate warming. By “ecologization,” we mean a legal and sociological process integrating environmental concerns into public policy (Deverre and Marie 2008) and practices (Ginelli 2017), commonly known as “greening.” In this context, “decarbonization” emerges as a new environmental objective, alongside water quality and biodiversity. Faced with this phenomenon, and despite their differences, the groups of actors governing the farming world (Ansaloni and Smith 2021) are gradually renewing their discourse to “make the climate challenge into an opportunity for agriculture,” according to the title of a report from the majority farmers’ union in France.<fnref n="1" /> Reactivating the figure of the farmer as the

<footnote n="1">¹ FNSEA, 2020, *Faire du défi climatique une opportunité pour l'Agriculture*, Paris.</footnote>
leading environmentalist (Lucas 2013), their message consists of asserting that agriculture is not a source of pollution, but first and foremost a reservoir of environmental solutions to be valued (Lejeune 2021).

This configuration presents the digitalization of agriculture as a major lever for the transition (Schnebelin, Labarthe and Touzard 2021). Because it proliferates data sources through new captors like chips, cameras, satellites, and integrated scales, and augments the ability to analyze them, digital innovation is technical solution of choice for responding to environmental imperatives. Although case studies qualify these hopes significantly (Magnin 2019; Oui 2021; Angeli Aguiton, Brunier, and Oui 2022), digitalization continues to symbolize the “revolution”<fnref n="2" /> that the sector is said to need to respond to the great challenges of the age. It is incarnated by the organizational form of the so-called “start-up,” a disruptive business aiming for rapid growth that offers the prospect of accelerated change up to the task of environmental transformation (Flocco and Guyonvarch 2020).

Several authors have identified these broad tendencies, including the economists Thierry Pouch and Marine Raffray cited in introduction. Such observations are not the foundation of our study, however - they are its problematic starting point. We think that sociology should resist the convenience of using some terms (like “climatization,” “decarbonization,” “digitalization,” and “start-up”) that may be practical for speaking of social mechanisms, but are so widely used that they ultimately proliferate independent of the thing they are supposed to designate, passing along an unquestioned value like counterfeit currency (Chouquer 2011).

We parry by digging deeper than keywords and slogans, which prevent analysis of the facts and uncovering the surprises they hold (Morlon and Sigaut 2008). Taking up the social study of technoscientific promises applied to the environment (Joly 2015; Foyer, Viard-Crétat and Boisvert 2017), we contribute to the empirical elucidation of a promise that flows from the convergence of “climatization” and “digitalization”: the “decarbonization” of agriculture by “start-ups.”

Decarbonization designates “the ensemble of measures and techniques making it possible to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,”<fnref n="3" /> which mainly occurs through the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. By extension, decarbonization has come to mean the reduction of all greenhouse gasses. This broad expansion of the meaning of the term is the result of a long scientific history wherein carbon became established as the standard element favoring discussion between physicists and chemists (Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve 2018). One of its oxidized forms, CO2, later underwent the same equivalency process (MacKenzie 2009), to the extent that it is now more than a gas; it is also a unit of measurement permitting the conversion of other greenhouse gasses into CO2 equivalents according to their heating potential. The focus on carbon dioxide, and abuse of the language in terms of carbon, facilitated the development of an imperative that exports easily to a variety of sectors (one speaks of decarbonizing mobility, culture, transportation, etc.). This convenience has a flip-side, however. Especially where agriculture is concerned, decarbonization is a reductive term, because CO2 emissions (petroleum consumption) only account for 12% of the sector’s overall emissions, well behind CH4 (methane emitted by ruminants) and N2O (nitrous oxide from organic and synthetic fertilizer), which represent respectively 45% and 43% in CO2 equivalents (CITEPA 2020). In practice, in reference to agriculture, decarbonization refers to several practices for the reduction of emissions of several greenhouse gasses, carbon sequestration in the soil, and the substitution of biomass for

<footnote n="2">² Ministère de l'Agriculture, 2016, *Alim'agri. La révolution numérique*, Paris.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Definition from the Commission d'Enrichissement de la Langue Française.</footnote>
fossil fuels.

The business form “start-up” that is being called on to speed up this decarbonization has “no official statistical definition” (Bignon and Simon 2018), and no widely accepted objective definition, for that matter. Its basic dictionary definition is “a fledgling business enterprise,”<fnref n="4" /> but in the business world, many actors using or laying claim to the word perpetuate a more specific meaning, as an innovative, even disruptive, new business aiming for rapid growth. Institutional definitions are proliferating with the development of policies to support start-ups, like French Tech, which defines a start-up as a “new business with a global ambition seeking an economic model that will ensure it strong and rapid growth.”<fnref n="5" /> Sociological studies of this category of business are few (especially compared to the number of studies on management), and agree on how varied it is (Grossetti et al. 2018; Flecher 2021). These studies identify multiple distinctive characteristics that aren’t necessarily all present in every instance: rapid growth, high technological innovation, a culture of disruption of business as usual, raising capital, delayed profitability, sale of the business after upscaling, a more horizontal work structure than in classic businesses, the importance of the service or product pitch. Far from trying to stabilize an objective definition, sociological studies of start-ups focus on the analysis of their social, political, and economic logics that fetishize the category (Zalio 2018). In continuity with this work, we set out to characterize precisely what the label “start-up” means when applied to the decarbonization of agriculture.<fnref n="6" />

Our study originates in our observation of actors’ abundant discourse on the subject, and how difficult it was to get a clear grasp on what it was. As our interviews progressed, we gradually realized that we weren’t the only ones with this trouble, and that the people we spoke with were also trying to understand what it covered, sometimes reversing roles in the interview to ask us the general questions that we had planned to ask them. Rather than stifling this puzzlement, so revealing of the emergent character of climate policy in agriculture, we decided to make it the guiding theme of our research: this is the kind of empirical elucidation that we offer here. This choice involves paying particular attention to the words circulating at the overlap of scientific, economic, political, and social spaces. What is the narrative around the “decarbonization” of agriculture by “start-ups”? We reconstruct the meaning of this promise (what does it signify?) and its implementation (what practices is it referring to?). What socio-technical configurations will manifest this promise? We use quotation marks here to materialize our distance from these words, which should be studied “as things” (Durkheim 1895): they are what must be explained, not analytical tools. While the sociology of promises - mostly in Science and Technology Studies (STS) - has mainly focused on their performative (van Lente and Rip 1998; Brown and Michael 2003) and mobilizing (Granjou, Louvel, and Arpin 2015) effects, we compare the meaning and the implementation of these promises instead. It is thus a matter of shedding light on a “pathology” of the regime of techno-scientific promises that, according to Pierre-Benoît Joly (2015), “reproduces a distinct separation between those who formulate the promise and those who are supposed to accept it.”

The questions that emerged over the course of the fieldwork tally with studies analyzing the ecologization of agricultural policy from the perspective of the private intermediaries who

<footnote n="4">⁴ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start-up</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://www.convergences.org/pour-une-french-tech-de-linnovation-sociale/; French Tech is a program created by the Ministry of the Economy in 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ We would also like to mention the forthcoming work of Victor Potier, Quentin Chapus and Julien Brailly on digital platforms in agriculture.</footnote>
implement it (Fouilleux and Loconto 2017; Mesnel 2017, 2018). Our study thus falls under political sociology, focusing on public intervention (policy) and groups involved in it (politics) while remaining open to economic sociology and STS. Our debts and contributions to these fields of study make it possible to uncover the specificity of environmental issues, characterized by both normative battles and their own particular materiality. This case study is intended to help us understand relations between businesses and public actors in the context of the ecologization of the agricultural sector, and field crops in particular.

Empirical study of the manifestations of a promise is built using an iterative method. The terms “start-up” and “decarbonization” are essentially imprecise. For a sociologist, then, research begins with compiling a list of actors to be interviewed. To do so, we consulted public and private documentation on start-ups, decarbonization, and carbon sequestration in agricultural land. We were careful to consider the full range of organizations without aiming for exhaustivity, which seemed unattainable given the profusion of initiatives on the subjects. As a result, our interviews come from self-identified start-ups as well as agricultural and computing businesses, consultants, and a soil-analysis laboratory. It is important to study the outlines of all these actors and their activities. Because we are studying an amorphous subject without clearly established boundaries, the list of interviewees also includes associations of farmers and agroecological technicians, farmers’ unions, researchers, and a high-ranking official from the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Despite our many attempts, both direct and through contacts, no-one from the Ministry of the Economy or the Ministry of Agriculture responded to our requests for an interview. Altogether, between December 2022 and May 2023, we conducted 40 interviews (Table 1).<sup>7</sup> In addition, our analysis relies on ethnographic observation of nine events spotlighting start-ups, including the Salon International d’Agriculture in Paris, and a variety of documentary resources (press releases, books by entrepreneurs, press clippings, ministerial reports, political speeches, internal meeting minutes).

<table><caption>Table 1: Interviews</caption><thead><tr><td>Companies</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Agrosolutions</td></tr><tr><td>Aurea</td></tr><tr><td>Carbone 4</td></tr><tr><td>Carbone Farmers</td></tr><tr><td>Datasol</td></tr><tr><td>Elisol environnement</td></tr><tr><td>FarmLEAP</td></tr><tr><td>Gaïago Carbone</td></tr><tr><td>Genesis (2 interviews)</td></tr><tr><td>Icosystème</td></tr><tr><td>MyEasyFarm</td></tr><tr><td>Novasol Expert</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="7"><sup>7</sup> This article came from the research program “Promises on Soil Carbon Sequestration” (POSCA), coordinated by Céline Granjou, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). We also thank our colleagues Stéphanie Barral, Laure Manach and Robin Leclerc, who conducted some of the interviews with us. Particular thanks to Stéphanie Barral for sharing an interview that she had conducted for her own research.</footnote>
<table><tr><td>Rize</td></tr><tr><td>Soil Capital</td></tr><tr><td>Soltis Environnement</td></tr><tr><td>Stock CO2</td></tr><tr><td>Sysfarm</td></tr><tr><td>Terraterre</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Professional organizations of farmers</strong></td></tr><tr><td>APCA – Assemblée permanente des chambres d'agriculture (national representative body of regional Chambers of Agriculture)</td></tr><tr><td>Confédération paysanne (left-leaning farmers' union)</td></tr><tr><td>Coordination rurale (right-leaning farmers' union)</td></tr><tr><td>FNSEA – Fédération nationale des syndicats d'exploitants agricoles (dominant farmers' union)</td></tr><tr><td>ITAB – Institut technique de l'agriculture biologique (research in organic agriculture)</td></tr><tr><td>JA – Jeunes agriculteurs (union for young farmers, associated with FNSEA)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Associations (NGOs)</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Afac-Agroforesteries – Association française des arbres champêtres (agroforestry association)</td></tr><tr><td>Agrotransfert (agricultural innovation)</td></tr><tr><td>APAD – Association pour une agriculture durable (soil conservation)</td></tr><tr><td>CoFarming (association of start-ups)</td></tr><tr><td>France Carbon Agri (agricultural innovation)</td></tr><tr><td>La Ferme Digitale (association of start-ups)</td></tr><tr><td>Réseau action climat (federation of environmental associations)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Researchers</strong></td></tr><tr><td>INRAE Agronomist</td></tr><tr><td>INRAE Agronomist</td></tr><tr><td>INRAE Agronomist</td></tr><tr><td>Professor of Agronomy in a public institution</td></tr><tr><td>CNRS Biologist</td></tr><tr><td>INRAE Ecologist</td></tr><tr><td>INRAE Ecologist</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Public authorities</strong></td></tr><tr><td>MTE – Ministry of Ecological Transition</td></tr></table>

Our empirical elucidation is broken into three parts. The first assembles the elements that comprise the *meaning* of the promise, situating them in a chronology and the field of actors. We document the convergence of multiple political agendas into a single narrative of the ecologization of agriculture based in carbon sequestration in the soil and an economy of innovation. In the second part, we provide an empirical description of organizational, economic, and agronomic *practices* that are invented under this narrative. We then describe the heterogeneity of self-described “start-up” businesses, noting that decarbonization is principally
addressed through public policy open to private actors. We conclude by contrasting the narrative
with our observations, the meaning of the promise with its implementation, in order to learn
more about the role of private actors in the ecologization of agriculture.

# 1. Decarbonization via start-ups: a solutionist narrative in the service of several political agendas

## a. Agricultural decarbonization: transforming a problem into a solution

Because it comes from the historical increase of greenhouse gasses since 1850, consideration of the effects of human activities on the climate is fundamentally connected to the question of the temporalities of public intervention. In this section, we will reconstruct the chronology of the inclusion of climate considerations in agricultural policy, which took shape through crucial events and documents that helped put the promise of agricultural decarbonization on the agenda and fostered its institutionalization.

We will start with the Paris Agreement, adopted at the COP21 in 2015, building on the cumulative work of the IPCC since 1990. The objective is “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels” by 2030 (Article 2, Paris Agreement). It was at this very COP21 that Stéphane Le Foll, French Minister of Agriculture 2012-2017, launched the “4 per 1000” initiative popularizing carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. In an article entitled “4 per 1000: What if the climate solution came from the soil?” (2017),<fnref n="8" /> he explained what the ratio meant: “If we were to increase the organic matter in farmland annually by four grams for every 1000 grams of CO2, we would be able to compensate for all greenhouse gas emissions produced on the planet in a year.” Media for the general public fueled considerable hope that agriculture might make it possible to sequestrate all human emissions. For example, the Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground (2020) presented Le Foll as the herald of a renewed agriculture, able to regenerate the environment and the climate.

Although its benefits have been scientifically proven, soil carbon sequestration on farmland does have its limits. Following the “4 per 1000” initiative, a reference report from INRAE (the French institute for agricultural and environmental research) determined that if French agriculture reached its maximal stocking capacity, it could only sequestrate the equivalent of 39% of its own greenhouse gas emissions, amounting to 6.5% of all French emissions (Pellerin et al. 2020). Consequently, the farm sector is physically incapable of compensating for the emissions of other sectors because it doesn’t have enough potential carbon sinks to ensure its own neutrality, balancing its emissions and absorption. Furthermore, this decarbonization of the atmosphere only draws out CO2, not CH4 or N2O, which, as we saw in the introduction, represent the majority of agricultural emissions.<fnref n="9" /> In addition, there is no guarantee that carbon will remain in farmland, because it depends on agronomic, meteorological, and biological factors that, if unfavorable, lead to the discharge of sequestered carbon in the form of CO2 (Kon Kam King et al. 2018). For these reasons, the sixth report of the IPCC declares that carbon sequestration in the soil and biomass “cannot compensate for delayed emissions reductions in other sectors” (IPCC 2022, 37).

The documentation of these limits coincides with an active promotion of farmland soil

<footnote n="8">⁸ https://agriculture.gouv.fr/4-pour-1000-et-si-la-solution-climat-passait-par-les-sols, emphasis ours.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Except that methane degrades into carbon dioxide 12 years after emission (Poux and Aubert 2021, p.118).</footnote>
carbon sequestration in the agricultural policy agenda. A string of events over the past few years have brought together actors governing the sector: the Ministry of Agriculture, the dominant farmers' union, and the agri-food industry. To give some recent examples, "carbon farming" was central to agricultural priorities under the France presidency of the European Union the first half of 2022; carbon is ubiquitous in the FNSEA's 2020 annual orientation report,<fnref n="10" /> and the think tank Agridées (bringing together actors from the farming, agri-food, and agro-industrial sectors) held round-table discussions and produced several articles on the subject over the course of only a few months. How to explain the paradox between the known limitations of farmland as a carbon sink, and the promotion of sequestration?

The promise of a solution responds to a problem that concerns more than the climate. If soil carbon sequestration, as a particular form of decarbonization, is indeed a physical mechanism, its politicization also responds to social, political, and economic problems faced by the actor groups governing agriculture in France. Chiefly, it offers an argument for delaying emissions reduction in the agricultural sector, which are significant: the Stratégie Nationale Bas-Carbone (2020), piloted by the Ministry of Ecological Transition, calls for a 46% reduction of agricultural emissions (at the 2015 level) by 2050. This massive change implies drastic measures: reduction in the number of dairy cattle by 25% and meat cattle by 33%, and elimination of 82% of surplus nitrogen sources<fnref n="11" /> (Ministère de la Transition Ecologique et Solidaire 2020, p. 33). But, starting with the same knowledge of the climate, experts from the Ministry of Agriculture came up with a different response: "the authors of the report insist that solutions should be implemented, especially to improve the condition of the land, to fight against its degradation and desertification. By capturing carbon, they contribute to improving the net value of greenhouse gasses and strengthen food security" (Lejeune 2021, p. 29; emphasis ours).

All of the scenarios that the Ministry of Agriculture presents in the prospective report targeting 2050 appeal to "the increase of carbon stocking in the soils thanks to appropriate cultivation methods, pasturing, and forestry" (Ibid., p. 31). This lever is supposedly so effective that it might even allow for an increase in emissions: one of the scenarios, "characterized by heavy consumption of resources (production and consumption)," generates "high greenhouse gas emissions" that would "be subject to mitigation thanks to technological solutions (including bioenergy with carbon capture and stocking)" (Ibid., p. 30). The insistence on solutions ties in with the optimistic title of the report, which was then published as a book: *Et si l'Agriculture Etait la Solution?"* (What if Agriculture was the Solution?).

Leaders of the agricultural sector picked up on this climate optimism generated by the "4 per 1000" initiative, and its meaning expanded. In the political space, it served as a facilitator in reconciling the environment and the economy. Soil carbon sequestration was a response to environmentalist critiques of productivist agriculture, understood here as an activity that aims for constant economic growth. This response shifted productivist rhetoric: rather than negatively declaring that environmentalists' criticisms lacked the legitimacy to reform agriculture, it put forward a positive proposal for resolving the problems identified in the critique (Brunier and Kotras 2024). It was supported by the figure of the "carbon farmer," which the Montaigne Institute<fnref n="12" /> translated as "carboniculteur": carbon sequestration made it about adding a climate

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The 68-page document contains 174 uses of forms of the word "carbon."</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ "Quantity of excess nitrogen added for cultivation, not used by the plant, that remains in the soil after harvest" https://glossaire.eauetbiodiversite.fr/concept/surplus-azot%C3%A9, accessed August 22, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Think-tank close to Emmanuel Macron's political party.</footnote>
service to farming’s existing outputs, rather than reducing production.<fnref n="13" /> Quantified by weight and by the hectare, on the same model used for calculating field-crop yields, this “carbon cultivation” is not incompatible with the concentration of land assets by farms: in theory, the more hectares a farmer works, the more carbon she can sequester. Presented as simple, this quantification of climate services also responds to the expectations of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which aims to reduce the gap between regulatory texts and their implementation by shifting from an obligation of means to an obligation of environmental results (European Commission 2021).

This quantification of agricultural carbon is also a response to economic challenges. The volatility of agricultural product markets and the lowering of the CAP budget reduce farmers' visibility of short- and middle-term revenues. Rewarding the climate services rendered by agriculture through the sale of carbon credits<fnref n="14" /> would bring them new remuneration or a supplement allowing them to invest in changing their practices. The “4 per 1000” initiative expanded part of the carbon economy of the forestry sector, which was well established in the matter, into the agricultural sector, for whom it was new.

These carbon markets, analyzed in the second part of this article, are based on the idea that ecologization through the markets is more effective than restrictive regulatory instruments. The logic of this political proposal is *solutionist* in that it transforms problems into opportunities for symbolic and economic development: 1) agriculture is one of many sources of greenhouse gasses, but it's also a carbon sink, and 2) the transition toward ecological practices is a new revenue source, not a cost that farmers must bear. We analyze this political argument as a promise, because it is founded on a hypothetical future. At the time this article was written (2023), only a few hundred of the 389,000 farms in France had engaged in the voluntary carbon markets.

## b. Start-ups as decarbonization operators

The climate promise formulated by those governing the agricultural world combines with the political agenda of the executive branch, both agreeing on a plan to reconcile environmental and economic issues.

In France, economic disruption - made possible by innovation - was particularly politicized by Emmanuel Macron and his supporters. As Minister of the Economy, Industry, and Digital Technology (2014-2016) and then as President of France (since 2017), E. Macron appropriated the catch-phrase of the American best-seller Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (Senor and Singer 2011).<fnref n="15" /> This identification between politics and business has been documented in political science, notably in two edited volumes: *L'entreprise Macron* (Dolez, Fretel and Lefebvre 2019) and *L'entreprise Macron : l'Epreuve du pouvoir* (Dolez et al. 2022). The latter noted an acceleration of recourse to the private sector in housing and health policy, leaving open the question of the start-upization of public intervention problematized by other researchers (Lamy 2020; Célérier and Arfaoui 2021). The argument is that “start-up culture” could even subvert old habits for conducting public business (Lacorne 2019) thanks to visionary individuals able to “revolutionize” them through technological innovations made

<footnote n="13">¹³ The same logic applies to the production of biofuels, which is outside of the scope of this article.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ One carbon credit is worth the equivalent of one metric ton of CO2 that is not emitted (reduction) or that is removed from the atmosphere (sequestration).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Of note is then-Minister Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Israel in 2015, a major milestone of the economic recovery and his promotion of the expression “start-up nation” (Quijoux and Saint-Martin 2020).</footnote>
possible by heavy private investment (Algan and Cazenave 2017; Pezziardi and Verdier 2017). This politicization of start-ups is based in an “anti-political” strategy” (Ferguson 1994; Hibou 2011; Chapus 2018) that aligns with the electoral strategy of getting past partisan oppositions (“neither right nor left”) embodied by Emmanuel Macron.

The mobilization of the figure of the start-up in the executive-branch discourse comes with financial measures. They do not mark a voluntarist break, but are a continuation of policies favorable to commercial innovation in use since the 1980s (Aernoudt 1999; Waser and Savignac 2003), although these measures are more prominent as instruments of governmental action (Célérier and Arfaoui 2021). For instance, the “French Tech” program was created “to make the State a partner in the growth of start-ups” to “foster the emergence of world-class technological leaders” (Ministère de l’Economie 2019).

Launched in late August 2021, the “French Agri-Tech” program plays this agenda out in the agricultural sector. Private technological innovation is presented as the “solution” to the future challenges to agriculture (Ministère de l'Agriculture 2021).<fnref n="16" /> This policy, developed by Julien Denormandie (Minister of Agriculture 2020-2022) is part of the “France 2030” plan introduced by President Emmanuel Macron on October 12, 2021. He announced “three revolutions” for agriculture “that, in a way, will be the next to follow the mechanical revolution and the chemical revolution we already experienced: digital technology, robotics, genetics.”<fnref n="17" />

Agricultural start-ups develop diversified services: insect farming, platforms for connecting professionals, selling connected equipment, and so on. For the climate, they are in the spotlight because they could favor the capture of CO2 by offering, for instance, “to calculate the rate of carbon in the soil to imagine solutions to regenerat it” (Ibid.). Public authorities accompany these emerging businesses and contribute to their burgeoning fame. For instance, at the “Agriculture, Carbone, et Climat” Day (January 31, 2022) held by the Ministry of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie promoted “carbon stocking” through agriculture, lamenting that “fewer than 0.1% of carbon credits traded on the global market were generated by the agricultural sector [in 2020].” He also boasted of the exemplarity of his ministry, which had begun to buy carbon credits from farmers to “compensate for [its] residual emissions” and whose central administration had thus been able to achieve “carbon neutrality.” The roundtable discussion alternated between actors from the public sector and start-ups.

This proximity was also salient at the 2022 Salon d'Agriculture. The Ministry of Agriculture's stand adjoined the even larger stand of an association of start-ups, "La Ferme Digitale," its only direct neighbor. During one visit to the Salon, the minister, trailing a group of journalists, visited the stand of a handful of start-ups, including one we had interviewed. When the co-founder began to introduce her company, the minister (who knew the start-up well, since he had awarded them a prize a few months earlier), took over and "pitched" the business to the Secretary of State, who accompanied him.

The great politico-economic orientations of a start-up led transformation are not intangible, and are made perceptible by the direct observation of interactions that are embedded in life histories. In this regard, the social trajectory of Julien Denormandie is paradigmatic. Trained as an agronomic engineer and graduate of the prestigious engineering school Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech, in 2014 he co-founded “a start-up in education with, among others, Emmanuel

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ The emphasis is linguistically quantifiable: there are 30 uses of variations of the word “solution” in 12 pages of text.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Elysée, *France 2030: présentation du plan*, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9mQlu-EQ-I, accessed November 17, 2021.</footnote>
Macron,” for whom he later became chief of staff at the Ministry of the Economy.<fnref n="18" /> After E. Macron was elected president in 2017, he was made Secretary of State for Territorial Cohesion, then Minister of Housing, then Minister of Agriculture. In this position, he set himself apart from previous ministers by his investment in digital technologies. In 2022 he left politics and was hired by a start-up specialized in the carbon impact of businesses. Promoting start-ups was thus not a new world he discovered upon becoming Minister of Agriculture, but rather a significant element in his socio-professional career that he plowed back into the political sphere, and into which he subsequently converted his political capital.

*

This first part explicitly defined the meaning and the mechanisms constituting the promise of agricultural “decarbonization” by “start-ups.” The connection between these two terms corresponds to the intersection of the categorial interests of majority agricultural organizations with the political objectives of the executive branch. At the heart of this alliance is the principle of reconciling climate imperatives and economic growth.

**2. Agricultural decarbonization through start-ups, in practice: elements of a division of climate labor**

Which actors implement this promise? In this section, we present the diversity of businesses in the amorphous cluster of start-ups for field-crop decarbonization, and then describe the division of climate labor of which they are part.

a. *Start-ups characterized by considerable heterogeneity*

We identified more than 20 private organizations selling services related to greenhouse gas emissions in field crops or to their ecologization through soil-based intervention. With a few exceptions, they largely fall under the amorphous label of start-up. Several indicators tie them to this group with shifting boundaries: laying claim to the label, participating in (and sometimes winning) dedicated competitions, belonging to a specialized association, being counseled by an incubator, emphasizing technological or scientific innovation in their services. They do not all have all of these elements, which is why we speak in terms of a group with blurry and unstable boundaries.

*Analysis of the characteristics of these businesses*

We will start by summarizing the data we gathered on the 18 businesses we studied in order to comprehend their historical dynamic and spatial distribution, the extent of their activity, and the social characteristics of their founders. Most of them are very new: only 2 were founded before 2010, 4 between 2010-2015, and 12 between 2016-2021 (9 of which in 2019-2021). Those founded prior to 2015 offer a variety of core services (laboratory analyses, environmental counseling, agronomic counseling, etc.) and only developed services specifically devoted to carbon and/or farm soil in the past few years. This development coincided with the founding of new businesses devoted near-exclusively to these subjects. The year 2015, the same year that the “4 per 1000” initiative was launched, seems to be a watershed, ushering in a more intense period of business creation and an attendant phenomenon of associative institutionalization shortly thereafter. Two associations of start-ups focused on the agricultural sector were founded in 2016

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ https://plus.lefigaro.fr/tag/julien-denormandie, accessed November 4, 2021.</footnote>
(La Ferme Digitale) and 2017 (CoFarming), and another association for businesses addressing carbon in agriculture was founded in 2022 (Climate Agriculture Alliance). If “AgTech” is a newcomer in France, the formalization of its carbon wing is even more recent. Geographically, these associations are not highly centralized, as less than half of them are based in Paris.

As expected, the volume of human resources rises with company age. Adding up founders and employees, we see that businesses founded before 2015 average around 100 people (min. 7, max. 250), when the average of those founded after 2015 is 9 (min. 2, max. 22). Although we could not obtain sufficient data for all of these businesses, it seems that the same progression is also found in their finances.

We did find significant gaps in inputs of capital, however. While businesses founded prior to 2015 rarely sought investors, more than half of those founded after 2015 did. Although most of the newer businesses had not reached profitability yet, those that sought outside capital were able to generate salaries for their founders and grow the number of employees, while other founders lived off their savings or, in some cases, unemployment benefits or another job that they hoped was temporary. Outside capital came from investment funds and private individuals in most cases. It sometimes came from “intrapreneurship,” which is when a business invests in a business founded by one of its employees; in both of the cases of this in our study, the employee subsequently left the parent company for independence.

Businesses are usually founded by groups of two or three people, and much less often by one person alone. Men are over-represented: of the 18 businesses, 14 were founded by men, 3 by women, and only one by a mixed-gender group. The average age of founders is 41, and rarely under 35 (3 of the 29 founders). They have diverse professional profiles: agronomic engineer, graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique, banker, entrepreneur, consultant, employee of an agricultural firms, computing technician, farmer and former industrial consultant, former journalist, researcher in ecology, agricultural equipment dealer, filmmaker. They have high educational attainments: the lowest is the equivalent of an undergraduate degree (three years of higher education after having passed the baccalauréat, but more often five years, the equivalent of a master's degree), and the highest a doctorate (or even a habilitation à diriger des recherches, a mid-career thesis making full professorship possible).

The careers of founders are largely polarized between two sectors: the business world and management on one end, and the world of applied sciences (agronomy and ecology) on the other, although one may follow the other in an individual's career. Some groups of founders are formed within one of these poles - sometimes siblings, or members of a graduating class (from schools including Sciences Po, Polytechnique, agronomy programs), or researchers from the same scientific space (laboratory, discipline). Others are composed by combining different worlds thought to be complementary (an entrepreneur and a communicator or agronomist, for example). Contrary to our expectations, very few founders come from digital innovation backgrounds.

We found that social background was the object of considerable self-presentation work. The websites of several recently founded businesses backtrack family ties to link one of the founders to farming, sometimes climbing family trees two generations, or diagonally, to find a relative who was a farmer. In addition to highlighting these distant or immediate family backgrounds, the commercial stakes of describing and promoting various registers of proximity with the farming world appear to be especially high, based on website iconography featuring entrepreneurs and employees photographed in the middle of a field of crops.

## *Three kinds of businesses*
Crossing this data on the identity of businesses (what they are) with the range of their activities (what they do) reveals three types of business<fnref n="19" />: innovative businesses, consulting firms, and administrative intermediaries. Their distinguishing criteria coalesce around how they relate to innovation (1), economic growth (2), public intervention (3), and the “start-up” label (4). These types are not exclusive groups, but rather modes of differentiation that may be accumulated by some businesses found across this typology.

### a. Innovative businesses

About one in six of the businesses in our study are what we call “innovative businesses,” the least numerous of the types. Such businesses offer systems for rating the “ecological health of the soils,” digital instruments connected to tractors, or products accelerating soil carbon sequestration. Their services are presented as brand new because they rely on considerable innovation (1). In fact, these companies stress the working relations they have developed with research institutions. They often hire employees with a doctorate in agronomy or ecology.

The founders are not trained scientists, however. They are experienced entrepreneurs, and older than the founders of the two other types. Starting with their entrepreneurial experience, sometimes in sectors other than agriculture, they have an economic model aiming for strong, rapid growth (2). Technical innovation is thus paired with a promotional presentation of the founders as visionaries calling for a profound transformation of the agricultural sector. This rhetoric of disruption is central in marketing strategies to attract investment, which could yield millions, if not tens of millions, of euros. The injection of capital prefigures an economic model of generalization, which wagers on a rapid national - or even global - expansion. The stated objective is making the business highly scalable, meaning able to expand rapidly to a large scale. Consequently, they target agro-food companies, banks, and insurance companies at least as much as farmers.

The desire to transform the agricultural sector puts these businesses in an ambivalent relationship with public intervention (3). For one thing, they rely on a critique of instituted ecologization policies (labels, public measures) that they intend to improve upon with a more precise, pragmatic, and profitable approach. Government is synonymous with heaviness, a heaviness that would be replaced by businesses reputed to be agile because they are innovative. The critique also concerns the environmental choices of public intervention. For one thing, several businesses regret that carbon is the object of so much political attention, arguing that biodiversity and water should be taken into account using finer analytical tools. They call for merging carbon credits and payments for environmental services, or tying a farm's environmental performance more strongly to its economic results. For another thing, these businesses benefit from programs for the support of innovation through prizes and sizable subsidies. Ultimately, they position themselves as strategists trying to influence existing policy, sometimes through their personal relations with local or national political figures. In so doing, they keep up with shifts in agro-environmental policy and try to stay a step ahead of future developments so they can influence and exploit them.

Lastly, these are the businesses that explicitly lay claim to the term “start-up” (4). They assemble several distinctive criteria: innovation, rapid economic growth, and the desire to radically transform the status-quo.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Both businesses founded prior to 2010, each with over 140 employees, were excluded from the typology because they donít have the same dynamic or volume of activity as the other studied businesses.</footnote>
### b. Consulting firms

Less than a third of the studied businesses, consulting firms offer services relying on particular specialized expertise. They offer soil analyses, training in agro-ecology, and localized evaluations. Their services are described as innovative (1) in that they are rooted in knowledge developed over the course of a career in academic research. Founded by researchers or other entrepreneurs with a science degree, these businesses may also have agreements with research centers. Their services, which sometimes include agronomic and ecological training on the soil, are based on long and often costly processes using specific knowledge. While the first type of business, described above, emphasizes innovation that can be applied as widely as possible, consulting firms offer customized services adapted to specific settings. For example, soil analyses are less reliant on industrial processes and call upon skills that are not easily automated, even when these entrepreneurs may have patented them.

The custom nature of consulting firm services goes hand in hand with an economic model that aims for profitability without scalability (2). For such businesses, which usually have fewer than five employees, increasing revenue means having more employees, which makes more work for the owner, who wants to continue applying his expertise. Consequently, the consulting firms we studied took out classic loans rather than seeking investors. Their goal is not growing as fast as possible, but maintaining their activity over time by being identified as the most proficient in their field.

As a result, consulting firms do not try to anticipate regulatory developments (3) because they offer analysis closer to a particular soil or territory instead of radical change. The public authorities with which they interact are more likely to be local governments than national administrations. These clients are looking for a detailed diagnostic adapted to their needs. As a result, like businesses of the first type, consulting firms tend to shun the centrality of carbon in environmental requirements and favor a multi-faceted analysis.

Consulting firms and innovative businesses also share the trait of being in close relation with scientific research, which leads them to participate in business competitions for start-ups. In interviews, however, the founders of consulting firms tend to take their distance from this label (4). They show themselves to be generally skeptical of a form of business that they suspect may not be profitable, and that might seek more investors instead. They play with the flexibility of the term start-up, enjoying the media exposure when they need it, while not entirely subscribing to the narrative of disruption that underlies it.

### c. Administrative intermediaries

Over half of the studied businesses come under the third type, which is thus the biggest, and the most varied. The commonality between all businesses in this group is that they are intermediaries between buyers and sellers on voluntary carbon markets. Consequently, their services are not innovative, or barely (1), and often amount to creating or using a digital interface (see below).

These businesses have a variety of economic models (2), ranging from a search for scalability with investment to a model similar to that of consulting firms. Most of them were founded recently. The majority focused on carbon from the outset, while a small minority added it to their prior offerings. Their founders are, on average, younger (36 years old) than those of the two other business types, and are equally divided between backgrounds in business and agronomy. The variety of economic models and socio-professional backgrounds is echoed in the variety of ways they position themselves relative to the label of start-up (4). Some founders from banking and business backgrounds were astonished we'd even ask if they considered their
business a start-up, it was so obvious to them. At the opposite extreme, a young agronomic engineer rejected the descriptor of start-up, finding it “pejorative,” especially because it suggested “a notion of scalability that we haven’t sought.” He prefers describing his business as a company for the social economy and solidarity, but, as with consulting firms, his reflexivity in an interview didn’t prevent him from winning a prize for the best start-up.

Uncovering this type of business is one major finding of our study, because it sheds light on the relationship between profitable private businesses and the state. Most of these businesses rely heavily on public intervention (3). Indeed, the French voluntary carbon market essentially depends on a public framework, so we should present how this framework operates before we can analyze how these businesses fit themselves into it.

## b. Decarbonization via administrative intermediaries: an objective largely controlled by public intervention

### Voluntary carbon market frameworks

Unlike the mandatory carbon market, in which international law imposes emissions quotas on big companies, the voluntary market works by mutual agreement with the contractual exchange of carbon credits, whose acquisition is not mandated by law and whose price is negotiated between buyer and seller, not set by any authority.

The basic outline of the voluntary market is as follows. On one side there is a business wanting to acquire carbon credits, not out of legal obligation but because it wants to “compensate for its residual emissions,”<fnref n="20" /> meaning emissions that are unavoidable. This purchase is a gage of its environmental engagement to its actual or potential shareholders, clients, and employees. On the other side is a farmer offering to implement practices to reduce emissions (covering slurry pits, reducing synthetic fertilizer use, etc.) or stock them (planting hedgerows, agroforestry, planting cover crops between market crops, etc.). The farmer puts carbon credits up for sale, and the business buys them once they’ve agreed on a price.

That is how this market works in theory. In practice, it can only happen on the condition that an external organization is called on to certify the rigor of the method for estimating CO2. This guarantor may be a non-governmental organization, as is the case for the Gold Standard, VERRA and ISO 14064-2:2019 methods. Only a handful of businesses use these private methods, while the majority operates under a framework developed by the Ministry of Ecological Transition, called “*Label bas-carbone*” (low-carbon label).<fnref n="21" /> This framework is intended to guarantee the reliability of exchanges by certifying recognized methods of calculation, and projects are audited by private independent firms. In fact, the voluntary carbon market didn’t emerge on its own, as the liberal conception of the market would have it, but was fundamentally initiated and built through public intervention or non-profit organizations that, ultimately, rely on international norms. Their voluntary nature mustn’t be confused with a lack of regulation.

The low-carbon label requires the intervention of a variety of actors whose number and roles vary according to a division of labor that is not pre-determined but depends on the breadth of services offered by the intermediary organization in question. We were able to distinguish four basic intermediary roles between farmers and carbon-credit buyers (Figure 1). Farmers are

<footnote n="20">²⁰ https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/label-bas-carbone, accessed August 25, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Contrary to what is suggested by its name, it is not a label to be displayed on products (like the organic label) but rather a certification applied to the farm for a previously agreed upon duration (based on a 5-year engagement).</footnote>
grouped together by a project leader<fnref n="22" /> (1), who may delegate a proxy (2) to submit the application to the Ministry, which, if all goes well, approves it. The application is composed using a digital template created by a developer (3), who has converted the Ministry's certified methods into a software interface. On the commercial side, a broker (4) connects proxies and carbon-credit buyers. The last two roles are not found on official documents, but were identified through our research.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1 - Administrative intermediaries for the low-carbon label</figcaption></figure>

*Businesses in the division of the administrative labor of agri-environmental policy*

Administrative intermediaries find many ways to make a place for themselves in this division of labor. The distribution of roles leads to variable combinations: in practice, we observed that the four roles in dashed boxes can be partially or totally merged into fewer providers. While some businesses limit themselves (short or long-term) to software development of templates that they sell to other businesses that act as proxy, others do both. Likewise, the roles of proxy and project leader, as well as proxy and broker, may be ensured by a single business or multiple specialized ones.

The innovative character of these businesses' services is low. Most start-ups are in the position of administrative service providers implementing a program previously developed by the state. As one start-up employee put it, "It might not seem like it, but the idea behind the company is based on the low-carbon label, because it's the environmental ministry's framework

<footnote n="22">²² These farmers may be cooperatives or a grouping of farm owners.</footnote>
that researchers, private-sector actors, etc., follow.” The digital dimension of their activities thus consists of creating a computer interface. As an employee of one of these businesses described it, “For the part concerning greenhouse gas emissions, the low-carbon label method gives all the database equations to be used. And so we just internally developed our own calculator, let’s say, for the greenhouse gas emissions part”; according to a founder, “The result will be the same, regardless of who uses it, but what changes is the interface, the ease of use.”

Consequently, far from the image of a disruptive business that takes a shortcut past traditional value chains (along the lines of Uber and AirBnB), these companies seem more like additional intermediaries in an economy strongly controlled by non-profit guarantors, within which they act as administrative service providers (compiling applications, following up on applications with the authorizing authorities, seeking opportunities for approved applications). This result describes a particular form of a more widespread phenomenon, the delegation of the administrative tasks of agricultural ecologization to private service providers (Mesnel 2020).

### 3. Start-ups in the service of agricultural decarbonization: performative, not descriptive, categories

What general conclusions can be drawn from these descriptive findings? In this part, we will demonstrate how this research made it possible to empirically elucidate the promise under study, first by focusing on start-up etiquette, and then on the watchword of decarbonization.

#### a. An emphasis on start-ups that obscures the social relations in which a variety of public and private actors are embedded

As in other economic sectors (Grossetti et al. 2018; Flecher 2021), the considerable heterogeneity of businesses described as start-ups demands that we reconsider the category’s status. We saw that not all of the studied businesses were recent, engaged in technological innovation, sought investment capital, or claimed to be a start-up. Henceforth, the label of start-up does not apply to a collection of identifiable characteristics, but rather to a performative objective that projects these ideal characteristics onto a group of businesses in order to draw attention to them. This tension is palpable in the gap between the law and political discourse: while there’s no legal definition of start-up, public actors use the word to indicate the dynamism of a political economy they want to encourage.

The actual extent of this performativity must be qualified. Earlier we mentioned the existence of “French Tech,” which sponsors calls for projects coordinated by the Banque Publique d’Investissement (Public Investment Bank) and oversees cross-cutting measures like the research tax credit. We realized, however, that “French AgriTech” didn’t have its own resources, and relied instead on the work of associations of start-ups. This confirms a basic teaching from the sociology of public intervention, which calls for relativizing the effects of political voluntarism (Dubois 2009).

One of our findings is a perfect illustration of this point: the creation of administrative intermediaries for field crops under the auspices of the low-carbon label is not the result of a proactive policy from the Ministry of Agriculture; instead, it seems more like the result of a vacuum left by the Ministry responsible for the environment and professional organizations in agriculture. A comparison of the field crop sector and the livestock sector is enlightening in this regard. The method for applying the low-carbon label to livestock farming was created by the
Institut de l'Elevage (Livestock Institute), which developed a diagnostic tool and an association, France Carbon Agri,<fnref n="23" /> which fulfills the roles of project leader, proxy, and broker. This means that the intermediary roles are played by pre-existing actors in agriculture. Inversely, the equivalent institute for field crops, Arvalis, has not invested in the implementation of the method for the low-carbon label for field crops. This vacuum is where entrepreneurs created administrative intermediaries, which explains why the businesses we studied reach out the field crop farmers. The incentive to create businesses thus seems to have happened in the negative: no public or public-adjacent intermediary was charged with implementing the framework, which seems to have left an opportunity for business creation. While France Carbon Agri has already enrolled hundreds of farmers in the low-carbon label program, most of the businesses we interviewed were only getting up and running. We observed this dissymmetry during research: it was much easier for us to get interviews with businesses, who wanted to get their name out there, than with associations,²⁴ who were already in full swing and generally had less time available.

More generally, the activities of these businesses are made possible by an assortment of actors that cannot be reduced to public policy. For one thing, the low-carbon label and other voluntary carbon markets are made possible by scientific progress through the predominantly public research that they operationalize. For another thing, this operationalization of knowledge presumes skills that, here again, existed before these businesses came along. The field crop method of the low-carbon label was only made possible by a model for forecasting soil carbon sequestration developed by the association Agrotransfert working closely with the French National Institute for Research in Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE).

The secondary character of these businesses relative to instituted agricultural organizations invalidates the hypothesis of the start-upization of public intervention. This designates mounting recourse to so-called disruptive businesses in the pursuit of public policy objectives and, by extension, the transformation of public intervention using this business model to resolve the problem of the “heaviness” of the administration (Lamy 2020; Célérier and Arfaoui 2021). In this case, the majority of the businesses described as start-ups are not platforms that work around the state to be in direct contact with constituents; they are supplementary links in a bureaucracy chopped into small units. Moreover, we observed that these businesses reactivate classic concerns of the agricultural administration, first and foremost surveillance. This is the case of Climate Alliance Agriculture, “the embryo of the agricultural carbon interprofessional alliance,” whose members include several of the businesses studied here. Its primary objective is inspection of farmers engaged in selling carbon credits, sharing data so that farmers can’t sell the same ton of carbon twice. One of them eventually wants to develop satellite surveillance, along the lines of state audits, in order to infer the quantity of carbon stocked in each plot. This tendency leads one to conclude that businesses are bureaucratizing their relationship to farmers more than public intervention is start-upizing. This is why businesses in type three (administrative intermediaries) could be described as “bureaucratic start-ups”<fnref n="25" /> to highlight the paradox upon which their activities are based.

### c. *A partial decarbonization of agriculture in the service of other economic sectors*

<footnote n="23">²³ France Carbon Agri changed from an association to a company (société par actions simplifiées) in March, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ This label is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, who in the 1920s sarcastically described the social group of entrepreneurs as “the bureaucratic clergy” able to create value independent of productive skill (Veblen 1994, 41; Charbonnier 2020, 30-31.)</footnote>
If the term “start-up” covers a variety of businesses, what practices are invented under the term “decarbonization”? This general political objective, when applied to field crops, chiefly promotes soil carbon sequestration. Despite the physical limits of this strategy documented by INRAE, the studied businesses emphasize this lever as a climate solution in agriculture benefitting the rest of society. Only one of their founders mentioned in an interview that agriculture is only capable of sequestering 39% of its own emissions. This gap between what is promised and what is possible comes from the language of “compensation” upon which the voluntary carbon markets are built. By saying that a business “compensates” for its emissions because it funds farming practices that reduce their emissions or sequester CO2, the low-carbon label promises a net contribution to the climate from agriculture. But since farms are still net emitters, in reality, their new practices are just a partial improvement of agriculture’s overall emissions thanks to private funding under the auspices of a public framework. Henceforth, shifting this partial improvement of agriculture’s net carbon performance to the business that buys it amounts to counting the same ton of sequestered CO2 twice. Agriculture is still a net emitter, so it can’t compensate for the emissions of another sector by reducing its own footprint. This ambiguity is the source of the success of the voluntary carbon market, where the same ton of CO2 helps improve the images of several actors: the seller, the buyer, the intermediaries who connect them, and the guarantor who created the framework.

The ambivalence is strengthened by metrological uncertainties that we found in our study. At this time, there is a lack of data on the proportion of carbon credits that are or will be generated by emission reduction or sequestration. Additionally, there is a temporal gap between politico-economic tools and soil cycles. Interviewees with backgrounds in agronomy or ecology stressed that the length of a farm’s engagement in the low-carbon label program (5 years for cereal crops) is too short for an observable increase in carbon in the relevant plots. For this reason, and for an economic reason, the field crop method favors a model fueled by declarative data because it is “even cheaper and easier” than soil analysis or satellite data (quote from an interview with an employee of the Ministry of Ecological Transition).

This metrological choice gives primacy to an obligation of means over the obligation of results that was announced in 2019. The lack of soil analyses before and after implementation of low-carbon label<fnref n="26" /> on a farm opens the system up to criticism from the actors themselves of the effectiveness and permanence of the potentially sequestered carbon. As a manager in a soil analysis lab told us, “I think it’s kind of light that there’s no factual confirmation of what is stocked at any time. Because they’re going to give figures, the models will give figures, no question, but what is it really?” Such doubts are shared by forecasters who think Stratégie Nationale Bas-Carbone’s predictions of carbon sink increases are over-estimated (The Shift Project 2022, p. 42).

Finally, decarbonization through voluntary carbon markets does not concern all of French agriculture to the same extent. One might hypothesize that the size of a farm facilitates the generation of carbon credits and associated revenue. In the CAP, the more hectares on a farm, the more public support it gets. Likewise, the more hectares it has, the more carbon credits it can generate by sequestering CO2. In parallel, the more head of livestock it has, the greater its potential for reducing emissions - through, for example, herd management optimization by reducing the age of calving or the replacement rate. This logic is furthered by the current price per ton of carbon, which interviewees placed around 30 euros in France - a rate that would only

<footnote n="26">²⁶ As our research was ending, the possibility of soil analyses to improve the value of generated carbon credits was being discussed for the low-carbon label.</footnote>
be profitable at a certain scale. The geography of agricultural carbon credits generated and underway supports this hypothesis: our study found that the southeastern quadrant of France, distinguished by extensive alpine livestock farming and market gardening, is little involved in the voluntary carbon markets for the time being.

## Conclusion

Our study demonstrates that there is a distinct break between the meaning and the implementation of the specific promise of “decarbonization” of agriculture by “start-ups.” The meaning of the promise is a massive improvement of the impact of agriculture on the climate, henceforth capable of sequestrating the CO2 emitted by the rest of society thanks to revolutionary technological innovations provided by visionary entrepreneurs. But in reality, the implementation of the promise is a voluntary improvement of the climate impact by a tiny part of the agricultural sector, under a state-administered framework that calls on private funders who reap symbolic benefits from it, and businesses offering administrative intermediary services.

Ultimately, this case study documents a social mechanism that concerns far more than the agricultural sector, operating throughout contemporary societies: the transformation of climate change into a promise of political and economic opportunity thanks to technological innovation. This study helps to demonstrate the potential of approaches that go beyond climate skepticism (Dunlap 2010) to focus on the appropriation of the fight against climate change by y dominant or emergent actors in the state and the economic world. By analyzing the social dynamics of these groups, their discourse, and their specific activities, sociology is able to elucidate the ins and outs of an ecologization that, although famously necessary, is presented under the guise of mysteriously positive promises.

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