Over the course of several recent months, Reuters photographer Stéphane Mahé visited and photographed a farmer named Jean-Bernard Huon on his farm in western France. Huon, now 70, grew up here, and deliberately lives a traditional, non-mechanized farm life, favoring ox teams over tractors. From a Reuters article: “When farm machinery revolutionized French agriculture in the years after World War II, a young Jean-Bernard Huon turned his back on the new technology. Half a century later, in a corner of southern Brittany on France’s west coast, Huon still uses oxen to plow his fields, determined to preserve an ancestral, peasant way of life.”
A Quiet, Ancestral Farm Life in Western France
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French farmer Jean-Bernard Huon, 70, carries hay at his farm in Riec-sur-Belon, France, on January 27, 2018. Huon's manual approach to subsistence farming makes him a rarity in the European Union's biggest agricultural economy. He shuns France's hypermarkets, instead selling his pork, veal, and butter to those who visit his ramshackle farm. #
Stephane Mahe / Reuters -
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French farmer Jean-Bernard Huon plows his land with oxen near his farm in Riec-sur-Belon, France, on October 25, 2017. In the last decade, he's made some concessions to comfort. He switched from work horses to oxen, which are more docile. More recently, as age imposes its own limits on his activities, he invested in two tractors for the heavy-lifting of hay. #
Stephane Mahe / Reuters -
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Huon at work on February 1, 2018. On the small farm where he grew up, the garrulous 70-year-old and his partner Laurence milk eight cows by hand, grind flour manually, and tirelessly collect manure to fertilize the crops that feed his livestock. #
Stephane Mahe / Reuters -
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