France is Europe's leading agricultural producer and the second largest producer for sea fishing. Foreign trade in raw and processed agricultural products remains structurally in surplus, even though the balance of trade with the European Union countries has been in deficit since 2015.

Agricultural employment and farms continue to change. Agricultural employment in France continue to decline, reaching 2.7% of total employment in 2022. Farm managers still account for the majority of agricultural labour force, but the number of family workers on farms is declining in favour of non-family employees. There are fewer farms, but they are larger and more specialised. Production methods are also changing, with an increase in the area farmed organically (almost 11% of utilised agricultural area by 2022).

The economic results of farms are particularly sensitive to natural hazards and to the international geopolitical and economic context. Producer prices, in particular, are volatile, which has an impact not only on the income earned from production sales, but also on the purchase prices of intermediate inputs (animal feed, energy, etc.) required for agricultural production. Farmers' economic situations are very diverse. Farm income varies greatly from year to year and according to production specialisation. Other sources of household income can partly mitigate the volatility of economic results from farming and the differences between specialisations, but there is still a wide disparity in living standards among farming households. In 2020, taking into account all available household income, 16% of people living in a household with at least one farm manager were living below the monetary poverty threshold, compared with 14% of the population as a whole.