Speakers
Description
Introduction
Crop-livestock integration and crop diversification are major levers for the development of agroecology and for improving farming system resilience by e.g. limiting disease pressure, optimizing the use of nutrients and regulating the water cycle (Lin, 2011; Martin et al., 2016). However, their implementation on the long term by farmers is a challenge, as they require an increased workload and more knowledge. Inter-farm collaborations involving the sharing of fields or a common crop planning, including pastures and crops to feed livestock, appear to be a lever for crop diversification. These organizations are poorly documented in the literature.
In this study, we aim to analyse how farmers collaborate to develop diversified production systems.
This study is part of a larger project conducted with Agrobio 35, i.e. the local organic farming syndicate, and a group of farmers that raised the topic of inter-farm collaboration to enhance crop diversification. This project aims at co-designing inter-farm collaborations with the group of farmers and produce transferable knowledge to provide advice to producers.
Materials and methods
To identify and analyse innovative inter-farm collaborations, we use the innovation tracking method (Salembier et al., 2021) organized in five steps:
1) Defining a tracking project
2) Unearthing on farm innovations
3) Getting to know innovations
4) Analysing learnings from the innovations
5) Generating agronomic content
We identified farmers through snowball sampling. We conducted the semi-structured interviews with the farmers involved in the collaboration separately, following these categories:
A) Farm presentation
B) Collaboration presentation
- Type of collaboration (Who is involved? What is exchanged? What values are assigned and how are they assigned?)
- Formalization of the collaboration
C) What leaded to this kind of collaboration?
- Economic, social, geographical context
- Motivation for collaborating with other farms
- Major changes in collaboration
- Perspectives
D) Externalities
- Diversification
- Benefits on soil, yield (quantity and quality), use of inputs, biodiversity
- Agri-environmental, social and economic satisfaction.
The interviews were analysed with qualitative multi-theme coding (Ayache and Dumez, 2011) in an inductive approach. We estimated how inter-farm collaborations impact crop diversity on farms.
Results and discussion
First, we described how the collaborations work and how they are organized. We analysed the formalization between the farmers, the motivations and the development conditions of these innovations. Then, a cross-sectional analysis of the cases enabled us to identify similar groups or trends (e.g. type of farm influencing the type of collaboration, or formalization being influenced by the trajectory of the collaboration). Favourable contexts to set up collaborations, common ways of formalizing and difficulties often encountered are highlighted. We focussed on the direct or indirect impact of livestock (e.g. feed crops and pastures in the rotations, organic fertilisation) on the crop rotations, in the cases of crop-livestock integration at inter-farm level. We then discussed the impact of these collaborations on crop diversity.
This research contributes to a better understanding of inter-farm collaborations and provide references for stakeholders that can enhance innovation process (Salembier et al., 2021). The results will be shared with Agrobio 35 and the group of farmers of the project.
References
Ayache, M., Dumez, H., 2011. Le codage dans la recherche qualitative une nouvelle perspective ? 7.
Lin, B.B., 2011. Resilience in Agriculture through Crop Diversification: Adaptive Management for Environmental Change. BioScience 61, 183–193. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.4
Martin, G., Moraine, M., Ryschawy, J., Magne, M.-A., Asai, M., Sarthou, J.-P., Duru, M., Therond, O., 2016. Crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level: a review. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 36, 53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-016-0390-x
Salembier, C., Segrestin, B., Weil, B., Jeuffroy, M.-H., Cadoux, S., Cros, C., Favrelière, E., Fontaine, L., Gimaret, M., Noilhan, C., Petit, A., Petit, M.-S., Porhiel, J.-Y., Sicard, H., Reau, R., Ronceux, A., Meynard, J.-M., 2021. A theoretical framework for tracking farmers’ innovations to support farming system design. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 41, 61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-021-00713-z
| Keywords | Collaboration; diversity; innovations tracking; crop rotation; farm organization |
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