Co-Design to Identify Lack of On-Farm Agronomic References?

A large part of Northern France is targeted by measures for water protection. Within an agricultural water catchment of this area, high nitrate and pesticide concentrations have led local authorities to encourage innovative farming practices through agro-environmental measures in 2007 and 2015. For six years, a group of 23 farmers has been involved in low input farming and benefits from specific advice and sharing experience (regular meetings, field tours…). To go further, they also have asked for our support to consider new technical leverages in order to both lower pollution risks and maintain or improve farm profitability. As the group has already improved its cropping systems (CS), we have considered i) the reasons why farmers do not use these techniques, except farm machinery availability, is that they need more references, ii) the references that they need are not obvious enough to be identified through a simple survey such as “what do you want /need to know to be able to improve your CS?” Several types of references were considered important for farmers to judge if they can introduce a technique in a given combination of CS and soil: the technique efficiency according to their objective(s), the conditions for which the technique is efficient and feasible, and its potential side effects. Thus, to select techniques and detect references needed we have proposed to co-design new CS with each farmer based on the second step of the STEPHY approach, initially developed to co-design CS for low pesticide use. To propose all suitable techniques or leverages according to farmers’ objectives, the STEPHY tool was enlarged to other objectives such as reducing nitrates leaching or avoiding resistance development to herbicides in weeds population. To do this, data on suitable techniques were compiled according to the types of references for each potential objective. In order to consider with each farmer the improvements he could implement, its main objectives were identified and a cropping system x soil type combination to be re-designed was chosen either for its water risk or for its economic importance. If the farmer has not or refused to introduce each proposed technique, then he had to argue the reasons. The information collected during the interviews with farmers has been expressed as questions such as: “does sunflower introduction need to be combined with mechanical weeding to reduce herbicide use in Rapeseed/ Wheat/ Winter barley/ Pea/ Wheat rotation on a chalky soil?” Those questions have been presented to the farmers’ group as a feedback for complements and validation. Starting from those questions, the group will have to choose techniques of interest, methods and tool (kind of experiment or survey) to test these techniques, protocols to evaluate their efficiency, their conditions of efficiency and feasibility, and their potential side effects.