Our company vegetable garden

How it all started

In 2017, Ecocert acquired La Côme park and two adjacent agricultural plots opposite its main building in L'Isle-Jourdain in the Gers region of France.

The idea was to turn these spaces into a place for living, meeting, sharing, experimenting, and learning. Mr. Vidal, co-founder of Ecocert, wanted to give all employees at the head office the opportunity to “get their hands dirty” and turn it into a community project. One-third of the produce is donated to the Gers Food Bank.

The project took shape in 2021, co-created with employees and in partnership with Terreauciel, a company that creates shared gardens.

The vegetable gardens

Thanks to the expertise of Terreauciel and Les Carrés Maraichers, three vegetable plots covering an area of approximately 1,500 m² will be created in 2021, followed by a fourth plot of 500 m² in 2023 and a 50 m² mandala of aromatic, dyeing, and medicinal plants. All plots are certified organic by an external certification body.

A professional market gardener is responsible on a part-time basis for the crop plan and planting seedlings on our plots. The crop plan evolves from year to year to adapt to soil and climate conditions, and the market gardener ensures that crops requiring little water are grown. He is assisted by Ecocert’s green space technician.

Each vegetable patch is identical and consists of 11 growing beds, each 25 meters long. These beds are then divided into 2.5-meter columns, allowing each vegetable grower to have 2.5 meters of each of the 11 crops.

Volunteer employees take care of maintenance and harvesting. They are called vegetable growers.

📌 2,000 m² of organic vegetable gardens 📌 1 mandala of aromatic, medicinal, and dye plants 📌 1 full-time equivalent created thanks to the project

Volunteer vegetable growers

The vegetable growers are the project's volunteer employees. There are 80 volunteers and a project team of between 3 and 5 employees.

The project team members allocate 1 hour of their working time and 1 hour of their personal time to managing and structuring the project.

The 80 volunteers are grouped in pairs. They are responsible for weeding, mulching, harvesting, and doing odd jobs on their plot. They also receive the weekly “garden gossip” newsletter and attend 10 workshops per year to learn more about market gardening.

In exchange, they must donate one-third of their harvest to the Gers Food Bank. In 2024, more than two tons of fresh, organic vegetables were donated to the Gers Food Bank.

📌 80 volunteer vegetable growers 📌 Over 2 tons of vegetables donated to the Gers Food Bank per year 📌 10 market gardening workshops per year

Thanks to their innovative and social dimension, our vegetable gardens have won:

• 1st prize in the Coupe de France du Potager (French Vegetable Garden Cup) – business category in 2023 by Landestini
• Social Commitment Award by the National Federation of Food Banks in 2025.

An integrated project

The vegetable gardens are part of a larger project: the Parc de la Côme project.

It consists of six projects, called “building blocks”:

• the vegetable growers on their market gardens
• the chicken keepers who look after the hens
• the beekeepers with their hives
• the scouts who run workshops for local children
• the protectors in charge of monitoring biodiversity in the park
• the experimenters on the agricultural plots

Each "brick" is made up of a project team of one to five people and volunteers. All of them have a common goal, whether it is donating their produce (vegetables and honey) or sharing information (with future generations, colleagues, etc.).

This open-source project has three objectives: social, environmental, and societal. The Parc de La Côme project brings together more than 120 employees out of the 400 working at the Isle-Jourdain sites. It is the ideal place to learn in the field, marvel at nature, meet new colleagues, and above all, feel proud!

Our vegetable gardens around the world:

Several of our subsidiaries around the world have also set up collaborative vegetable gardens, such as in Colombia and Madagascar, in their office gardens. In Peru, the teams have created a rooftop vegetable garden in the middle of the city of Lima!