Design workshop with farmers as a promising tool to support the introduction of diversifying crops within a territory: the case of camelina in northern France to supply a local biorefinery

Leclère, Margot; Jeuffroy, Marie‐Hélène; Loyce, Chantal

doi:10.1051/ocl/2021023

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This raises issues about how to design assessments to enroll farmers. Some articles insist on the importance of co-designing assessments with farmers, especially in peer-to-peer exchanges, and other agrifood actors (e.g., Guzmán et al 2013;Boulestreau et al 2021;Leclere et al 2021), but they remain rare. Even rarer is research on how initial assessments shape the subsequent transition process.…”

Section: Ongoing Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

Prost

Martin

Ballot

et al. 2023

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In response to the sustainability issues that agriculture faces in advanced economies, agroecology has gained increasing relevance in scientific, political, and social debates. This has promoted discussion about transitions to agroecology, which represents a significant advancement. Accordingly, it has become a growing field of research. We reviewed the literature on and in support of farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies in order to identify key research challenges and suggest innovative research paths. Our findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Research that supports exploration and definition of desired futures, whether based on future-oriented modeling or expert-based foresight approaches, should more explicitly include the farm level. It should stimulate the creativity and design ability of farmers and other stakeholders, and also address issues of representation and power among them. (2) Research that creates awareness and assesses farms before, during or after transition requires more holistic and dynamic assessment frameworks. These frameworks need to be more flexible to adapt to the diversity of global and local challenges. Their assessment should explicitly include uncertainty due to the feedback loops and emergent properties of transitions. (3) Research that analyzes and supports farms during transition should focus more on the dynamics of change processes by valuing what happens on the farms. Research should especially give more credence to on-farm experiments conducted by farmers and develop new tools and methods (e.g., for strategic monitoring) to support these transitions. This is the first review of scientific studies of farm transitions to agroecology. Overall, the review indicates that these transitions challenge the system boundaries, temporal horizons, and sustainability dimensions that agricultural researchers usually consider. In this context, farm transitions to agroecology require changes in the current organization and funding of research in order to encourage longer term and more adaptive configurations.

show abstract

Section: Ongoing Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

Prost

Martin

Ballot

et al. 2023

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

How agricultural techniques mediating bottom-up and top-down regulation foster crop protection against pests. A review

Bellone

Gardarin

Valantin‐Morison

et al. 2023

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A participatory and multi-actor approach to locally support crop diversification based on the case study of camelina in northern France

Leclère

Loyce

Jeuffroy

2023

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the acknowledged benefits of crop diversification, the transition towards more diversified cropping systems needs to be supported, mainly due to socio-technical lock-ins favoring major dominant crop species. This calls for the development of new approaches to support the design of locally tailored diversified cropping systems. This paper aims to present an original participatory and multi-actor design approach, developed to support the introduction of camelina (Camelina sativa) into the cropping systems of northern France and to provide some insights about the characteristics, the specificities, and the limits of this approach to support its use and adaptation to other contexts. For 3 years, and in connection with the development of an oilseed biorefinery, we gathered a variety of actors (farmers, advisors, engineers in agronomy, researchers, and industrialists) to locally support the introduction of camelina in the cropping systems. First, we illustrate the diversity of the modalities that have been collectively imagined to introduce and manage camelina in the local cropping systems. Then, we describe the originality and the diversity of the knowledge produced on camelina, especially during the assessment of some of these modalities within on-farm experiments. Finally, drawing on concepts and theories from design sciences, we show that (i) the pre-existence of networks of actors, (ii) the rationale involvement of the actors, (iii) the implementation of a situated design process fueled by action and distributed among actors, (iv) the sharing and the circulation of knowledge among a diversity of actors involved in the production and use of the new crop, and (v) the implementation of an effective network management contributed to foster the three key elements that we identified as crucial to support crop diversification, namely, the production of actionable knowledge, the exploration of new ideas/concepts, and the active participation of a diversity of actors of the agri-food system.

show abstract

Design workshop with farmers as a promising tool to support the introduction of diversifying crops within a territory: the case of camelina in northern France to supply a local biorefinery

Cited by 7 publications

References 43 publications

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

Key research challenges to supporting farm transitions to agroecology in advanced economies. A review

How agricultural techniques mediating bottom-up and top-down regulation foster crop protection against pests. A review

A participatory and multi-actor approach to locally support crop diversification based on the case study of camelina in northern France

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About