Speakers
Description
Context description and research question: Reducing pesticide use such as glyphosate, is a key challenge to support agroecological transition and resilience of farming systems. However, politicians and scientists argue that in certain situations, which they describe as "dead-ends", reducing glyphosate use is particularly difficult because of structural barriers (Reboud et al., 2017). Then, our aim was to shed light on innovations from farmers – focus on technics, equipment and collective action - to reduce the use of glyphosate in two “dead-ends” situations: slopping vineyard and low-till cropping system.
Method and theoretical background: We adapted a tracking on-farm innovation method (Salembier et al., 2021): (i) We identified 16 cases through exploring databases, professional agriculture press, and contacting extension agencies. (ii) We performed semi-structured interviews with farmers about innovation. (iii) We analyzed the systemic nature of innovation thanks to an in-depth inductive analysis of each case, relied on the concepts of coupled innovation (Meynard et al., 2017) and of action logic (Salembier et al., 2021). (iv) We built typologies through a cross analysis of the case studies.
Results and discussion: Three major results emerged: (i) We characterized five types of innovation on collective action that supported farmers’ access to key levers in weed management: 1) sharing resources (e.g. equipment, land, herd); 2) sharing labor (e.g. shared employee); 3) sharing technical management decision (e.g. collective decision in a common crop rotation); 4) developing a new resource (e.g. self-building an equipment adapted to sloppy vineyards); 5) accessing agricultural services. This typology corroborates and enhances the findings of Lucas et al. (2018). (ii) We identified three types of innovation on equipment to perform weed management: 1) flexible use of an equipment (e.g. a seed drill for sowing on straw and on cover crops); 2) combining equipment to perform two tasks at the same time; 3) designing and building a new equipment (e.g. under-vine mowing tool for terraced vineyard). (iii) We identified 3 types of coupled innovations. In vineyard: i) managing perennials on moderate to steep slopes (>30%), which is based on frequent tillage, using combinations of equipment (5 cases); ii) managing perennials on steep slope vineyards (30%) by covering the soil in inter-rows and employing moderate tillage under vine, which involves shared equipment and/or workforce (2 cases); and iii) weed management in terraced vineyards (30-40%) while limiting erosion and mitigating the challenges associated with working on steep slopes, through the use of self-built and shared equipment (2 cases). In cropping system: i) coordinating management of crops and livestock, which involved a few field interventions for weed management while also contributing to livestock feeding (e.g., grazing on cover crops) and cost reduction (3 cases); ii) minimizing the harmfulness impact of weeds through the increase diversification of crop rotation, sharing equipment and/or workforce (2 cases); iii) eliminating weed in monoculture by employing precision equipment, as well as pooling workforce (2 cases). Our findings enrich the literature on coupled innovation in weed management strategies (Boulestreau et al., 2022), and it provides evidence on how these systemic innovations work to address technical and organizational issues, which allowed farmers to manage weeds and cover crops in situations considered as strongly dependent on glyphosate in “dead-ends” situations. The innovations identified could inspire other farmers engaged in the redesign of their farming systems to be free from glyphosate.
| Keywords | equipment; collective action; technical system; glyphosate; redesign. |
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