Looking for an orchard for sale in France, and specifically in Pays de la Loire? This western region is one of the country's main fruit-growing areas, where Loire Valley apples and pears lead the way alongside plums, cherries, walnuts and soft fruit grown for short supply chains. Behind the holdings listed here stand growers reaching the end of their career, rural agencies used to dealing with planted land, and notaries; each listing gives the area under trees, which species and varieties stand there, how old the rows are on average and what equipment comes with them. They join the orchards for sale listed across France.
Listings alone rarely settle a purchase, so this page adds the benchmarks that do: what land is worth in the region, which departments bring holdings to the market most often, how to read an orchard and its replanting schedule, and the checks to carry out before signing. Setting up the project itself, from professional qualification to the funding plan, is covered in our white paper « Créer une exploitation agricole » (in French).
Land forms the base of the value of an orchard. DVF, the property sales database published by the French tax administration (vineyards excluded), records farmland changing hands in Pays de la Loire at a median of €3,267/ha in 2025, average €3,842/ha, over 1,873 sales. Four sales in five fall between €1,990 and €6,500/ha; the national benchmark is €5,307/ha.
The SAFER benchmark completes the picture: €4,100/ha in 2025 for vacant land and pasture (+1.5% in a year, +11.7% in ten), against a national average of €6,460/ha, with let land trading some 17% below that.
The hectare figure never tells the whole story of what you are buying. The trees themselves and the productive life left in them count, as do the irrigation system and the water abstraction permit behind it, the hail netting, the shed, the cold store, the grading line and the housing for seasonal pickers. Then comes the business itself: a commitment to a producer organisation, a direct-sale customer base, regulars at the pick-your-own gate. Place the price levels with our land price observatory and cost your takeover with our financial calculators.
An orchard is read row by row, never from the land registry plan alone. For each plot, record the species and variety, the rootstock, the number of trees per hectare, the training system chosen, the condition of the trellising and stakes, and how many trees are missing. A plot carrying sought-after varieties still in full bearing holds most of the value; an ageing plot, or one planted with varieties losing their outlet, mainly represents grubbing-up and replanting costs to come. Water access weighs just as heavily: drip lines, a declared borehole, a hillside reservoir or a collective connection shape both the growing system and the price.
Ask the seller for the replanting record of recent seasons and the areas already grubbed up: it will tell you whether you are taking over a tool kept up year by year or an orchard whose catching-up will fall to you. Where the sale includes the dwelling house, the buildings and the land, insist on an item-by-item breakdown rather than one overall figure, since plantings, bare land and a house are neither financed nor written down in the same way.
A good share of holdings in the region run their own downstream workshop: reception bay, grading line, sorting table, packing into trays or bags, bulk bins and a forklift. The cold store, and still more a controlled-atmosphere room, changes everything for apples and pears, since it allows sales to be spread across the season instead of following the harvest. Check the age of the refrigeration units, the insulation of the rooms, the electrical capacity available and the state of the loading bay: bringing a packing shed back up to standard quickly costs as much as replanting a block.
The outlet deserves the same attention. Many growers here deliver to a producer organisation or a collective packing station, which secures the flow but frames volumes and varieties; others have built their own trade through markets, farm shops and pick-your-own. A fruit farm with direct sales is valued partly on that customer base, which should be assessed separately from the buildings and the trees. Housing for the seasonal workforce, without which the crop cannot be picked, is worth visiting too.
Maine-et-Loire (49) is the fruit-growing heart of the region. The Saumur country, the Layon slopes and the communes around Angers hold apple and pear orchards grown for the fresh market, in a department where specialist plant production, nurseries and ornamental horticulture included, supports a whole chain of services, young plants and machinery. Handovers happen regularly but competition is real: planted land trades higher here than elsewhere in the region, and ring-fenced holdings with their own packing shed find a buyer quickly. This is also where the supply of orchards already certified organic is widest.
Loire-Atlantique (44) combines peri-urban fruit growing aimed at Nantes and its short supply chains with larger holdings on the light soils of the south of the department. Soft fruit, apples and pears sit alongside market gardening, and pressure from urban growth makes well-placed plots scarce and sought after. Vendée (85), better known for arable farming and livestock, offers a quieter seam: medium-sized orchards, often paired with farm-gate selling, on land whose price stays moderate compared with neighbouring departments.
Sarthe (72) links back to the fruit traditions of the Loir valley: dessert apple orchards along the river, cider plantings on the slopes, and blocks of plums and pears scattered through the hedgerow country. Holdings reach the market at an irregular pace, but land stays affordable. Mayenne (53), a hedgerow livestock department, has only a limited number of specialist growers; orchards there usually take the form of a complementary enterprise, cider apples or direct sales, attached to a wider farm. For a first move into the sector, widening the search to these two departments opens up options that Maine-et-Loire alone no longer provides.
The health status of the plantings comes first. Have the trees checked for bacterial and viral disease, fire blight in particular, which attacks apples and pears; ask for the plant passports of the young trees used in recent replanting and for the spray records. Then look at how the orchard is protected: hail netting and its supporting structure, frost protection by overhead sprinkling or wind machines, and shelter hedges. No-treatment buffer zones next to houses sometimes cut back the area you can actually work along a plot edge, so measure them on site.
On the legal side, the sale goes through the structures control — France's permit system governing who may take on a given holding — and through SAFER's pre-emption right, applied closely to planted land. Check the status of every plot: owned outright, or occupied under a running lease that follows the holding and binds the incoming grower, with the landlord's consent required. Finally, confirm that water abstraction permits are in order and, if you are seeking setting-up support, file the application before signature.
Private sellers stepping back, rural estate agencies and notaries: the holdings published here come from varied sources, and each listing details the plantings. Narrow the results by area, by species or by budget, then switch on an alert to receive new listings as they appear. You can also widen the search to every farm for sale in Pays de la Loire.
