Before leaving to raise chickens in Calvados, Gaëlle Bonnieux was an executive in impact finance. In 2019 she changed her life and co-created Gonne Girl, a diversified farm with 1000 laying hens, 2000m² of market gardening, a gite and a horse boarding house. She explained to us how she organizes their many activities and adopted the "lean" method to manage the farm.
You started your career in finance, before starting GonneGirls Farm: how did you experience the change in terms of work methods and what skills from your former profession have been useful in your farming journey?
Indeed, the work is quite different because I was working in a big team for an asset manager so everything was very established, structured, processed... Starting a farm means doing a lot of things by yourself and therefore being extremely versatile when you start this kind of activity. I experienced it as a great freedom, and at the same time it's quite dizzying to find yourself alone to develop a business from scratch.
The experiences we had with Claire, my partner, in our respective jobs helped us to prepare the launching of the farm. Claire has a marketing and communication background so she did all the visibility work: defining the name, the brand, getting people to talk about us... This was an important factor in making the farm and our direct sales activity known. As for me, I have skills in project management, which was very useful to define a business plan, to evaluate the risks and how to reduce them, to anticipate the cash flow needs, to manage multiple deadlines, to contact the banks, to seek subsidies, to approach private partners... For all this my previous experiences were very useful.
You are working on "lean management" on the farm, a practice that is rather widespread in industry: how have you adapted it to farm work?
This year on the farm we are 2 partners and an employee. We are also associated with 5 market gardeners who have taken over the market gardening part of the farm in a test area since the beginning of the year, so there are quite a few of us on the farm.
The lean methods were not developed by us, but by Ben Hartman, an American who founded the theory and wrote books that we read with great attention. The concept is to earn more, to have a more profitable activity by working less and by reducing the drudgery, which is a rather attractive idea!
We have not adopted lean in terms of tools - Kanban, boards, etc., which are the classic tools of lean management - but rather in the approach: we are constantly reflecting on the points of difficulty in our processes. For example, if we know that there is a difficult moment in the year, which generates stress, if there is an action or an activity which is physically difficult, for all the moments when we are waiting and which create frustration or financial losses, we will immediately try to find solutions, to change the model to reduce the loads carried, the travel, the waiting times and the difficulties whatever they are. We do this in a rather agile way in the management of our operation, we always try to rethink, to improve the models. This can be a bit disturbing for some people who like stability, regularity, because we are in a process of permanent improvement.
For example, in the management of the laying hens, until recently we fed them with buckets: we filled buckets with pellets, we put them in the tractor trailer to bring them to the fields and go feed the hens. We have 1000 hens, so that's 130 kilos of food to carry every day: it's heavy, you have to bend down, lift them, do a lot of movements. When you do it every day, it's extremely tiring. We started by setting up an organizational solution with rotation systems so that we could help each other and not always have the same person do the work. In a second step, we decided to invest in big feeders that we installed in the fields and that we will fill directly with the tractor. This required a financial investment, we didn't necessarily have a lot of financial resources but we organized ourselves to find them. It changes our system a little bit but we didn't want to spend our life carrying buckets. It sounds simple, but sometimes you can spend years doing hard things without necessarily questioning the way you do them. We didn't question it before because all the places we did our internships in... people were carrying buckets!
We also had a process that took a lot of time, which is the sale of cull laying hens (Editor's note: cull hens are "retired" hens) that we would sell to individuals on Le Bon Coin. We have 1000 hens to sell per year and it's a lot of work to exchange on Le Bon Coin, to go and get the hens each time buyers come to pick them up even if we have limited the hours of sale at the farm. The person who takes care of the chickens doesn't have time to do anything else, all his time is devoted to the sale. We finally found a partnership with a structure that can buy the hens from us, certainly at a much lower price than the one we used to sell directly to individuals, but it allows us to save so much work time that it is still advantageous for us.
Nothing is really revolutionary, we are not reinventing the agricultural system, far from it, but we have noticed that there is something that makes, in human nature, that we tend not to ask questions and just repeat painful tasks!
While managing your farm, you also work for South Pole, a company that helps create projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: how do you organize your time as a farm manager?
It's very recent, I only started a month ago! We decided this year with my partner to extract ourselves from the operational part of the farm. This will allow us to think about the next step and prepare the farm for its next stage of development which also requires financial investments and a personal contribution, so we will take up a salaried activity to put money aside, take a step back from the operational part and also take a little break because we have been working hard physically for 4 years, so we needed a little time to take a breath.
At the moment I work 4 days a week for South Pole and I dedicate 1 day to the farm, plus some weekends to take care of the hens, prepare the mobile hen houses... We have organized the activities with our employee Emma and the group of market gardeners who also take care of the hens. We set up a system where one full-time equivalent of the market gardening team is assigned to our layer activity. With Claire we have divided the management and supervision of the farm between us to ensure a good rotation on the operational, administrative, financial, communication aspects... In addition to these tasks, Claire mainly takes care of the horses and I take care of the gîte.
In reality it has always been a bit like that because we have never been only farmers, mainly for financial reasons at the beginning because it was necessary to invest in the project, to have complementary incomes and that's why we turned to diversification with 4 activities: the laying hens, the market gardening, the lodging which also allows us to welcome seminars of companies and the pension for horses. We are used to juggling several activities at the same time, the important thing is to find the right balance between work and income!
What does a typical day at Gonne Girls Farm look like?
There really is no typical day at Gonne Girls Farm! An example of a day could be feeding the hens and opening the greenhouses at 8:30am, then candling the previous day's egg harvest - candling and grading means sorting the eggs by size with a machine, and seeing if there are any cracks in the eggs - then preparing the orders for the customers who come to pick up their baskets at the farm. All this takes about 2-3 hours, at 11:30 we go back to feed the hens and collect the eggs of the day, which takes about 1 hour or more if we have to move the mobile hen houses. After the lunch break, we go for example to install fences to anticipate the movement of the hens, to go to the gite to check before the arrival of the customers and to welcome them, and at the end of the day we generally check if everything is well in the henhouse, if the hens have enough water, etc... We also go to see how the horses are, to put or take off the blankets, to check that they don't have any injuries...
Looking back on your career, do you think you have made mistakes or on the contrary, are there any successes that you are particularly proud of?
We started the business without having worked on a farm for a long time, which was both a strength and a weakness. A strength because we had no preconceived ideas, we were quite open about how we were going to create our business and everything seemed possible. This may have allowed us to be freer in our approach to the business. And at the same time, the fact of having a long-term experience would probably have prepared us better psychologically and physically for what was ahead of us. We put a lot of effort into launching the farm, probably too fast and too hard, so if I had to do it again I would try to get help earlier so that I could have more energy and work less because it was very hard and very intense, especially during the first two years, when we worked a lot alone. If we had to do it again, maybe we would prepare a little bit longer and we would surround ourselves from the beginning.
On the things we did well, I would mention starting a diversified business because that really saved us during Covid, having the farm sale and several activities, we were not dependent on one source of income.
The collective installation with the market gardeners was really a factor that allowed us to refocus. The diversified activity is very good but we also have to choose where we put our efforts and what we can delegate. Mutual aid is important!
https://gonnegirls.farm
