Speaker
Description
Farming systems are both impacted and responsible of climate change, due to a major cause of greenhouse gas emission and consequences on farmers’ productions. In response to these challenges, innovative farming systems based on agroecological principles emerged. Their development transform specialised and input dependent farming systems. Agroecological transformations have not been documented extensively, but it is necessary to understand them for generalising their processes. In this study, we described coevolution of herd and its feed resources during agroecological transformations of the on-station farming system Oasys (INRAE, Lusignan, France). During this work, we rebuilt the evolution of practices on cows, crops and pastures management. Thanks to archives with details on the design, the system establishment and team’s discussions we were able to trace trajectories of crops, pastures and animals for identifying the main phases and practice changes over time. Then, we analysed dynamics of agronomic, breeding, economic and environmental performance of the system. The results showed time synchronisations between trajectories and trend changes of performance. For example, in 2018 the start of a phase with deeper changes occurs with trend changes in feeding and production of herd: decrease in concentrates intake, early start of the grazing seasons, increase of milk solids contents, etc. The adapter with shifts in perspectives, new learnings and new decisions will be analysed in a future study.
| Keywords | coevolution ; dairy farming ; transformation ; agroecology ; resilience |
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