In 2022, she created Les Jardins de l’Hermine, a little farm producing organic fruits and vegetables, located in Vigneux-de-Bretagne

English transcript of the podcast:

Can you introduce yourself and briefly present your company/association?

My name is Natalia, I am 39. I started as an engineer in agro-food and vegetal biotech, before moving on to market gardening 5 years ago. And a year ago, I created farm called Les Jardins de l’hermine, located in Vigneux-de-Bretagne, at the North of Nantes

What is for you an impactful entrepreneur who takes environmental and social challenges into account?

Based on your experience, how aspiring entrepreneurs can identify/recognize an impactful and responsible entrepreneurial opportunity?

It can take multiple forms. It may be visible through the goal set by the structure, and take the form of a positive social or environmental impact. Personally, that is what I am trying to do by trying to work as much as I can with people in the same region as me (may it be consumers or sellers). But it can also be inside the company, through the way people will manage their employees and the social connections among them. When you take into account the social part among your company, you create an impact directly inside the company. Everything I used to do as an engineer inside my former company seemed useless to me, or at least very different from the values and the ambitions I had. That is why I started my own business.

To me, the most important thing here is to identify your own values, as an entrepreneur. What moves you deeply, what are you ready to stand for? It really varies according to the person starting their business, and to me that should be at the core of your entrepreneurial project. What really mattered to me, was to join my personal values and my professional activities into one activity. It needed to be coherent as a whole.

How to build an emerging responsible organization to support an entrepreneurial opportunity?

It may sound really difficult to start your own business at first, but when you dive into it, you can actually see all the tools that exist to help you on this path. There are, for instance, networks that aim to help young entrepreneurs starting their business. When you know where you want to go, it becomes much easier to recognize opportunities and to seize them afterwards.

How do you measure your impact on the problem you solve?

To me, the impact is mainly visible when you look at yourself. This is something you should start because it moves you deeply, and because you believe in it, so you will see the impact on a personal level before anything. That is one of the pillar of permaculture actually: feeling good around yourself before trying to feel good around others.

Then on a practical level, my goal is to produce organic vegetables and fruits and to feed the community around me (local distribution). I will therefore measure my impact through my capacity to produce organic vegetables and fruits, and then through my capacity to sell them and make a living out of it.

How did you manage to make your venture/association economically viable?

Economic viability is something that really varies according to each individual’s ambitions. When starting your business you should take this time to define your economic goals and along the way, to check whether you are managing to achieve those goals or not. Knowing what your company needs to be viable, starts by knowing your own financial needs. Once you’ve done that, you can start thinking about a business plan that will lead to the resources you will need to gain to have a viable model. Personally, I compared the prices with other farmers to see how much I should sell each vegetable and fruits, and I defined my personal needs in terms of money. You need to compute your expenses and the costs of your equipment as well. I also looked at the resources of the surrounding population and taking all these things into account, I managed to set prices to my vegetables and fruits, that seemed fair both for me and the consumers.