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The bocage landscape has long been an object of study albeit by only a few scientific disciplines (history, geography…). A bibliometric analysis shows a considerable increase in publication numbers on bocage landscapes, with a switch of emphasis over the past 10 years. Initially researchers focussed on the impact of hedges and bocage structures on field functioning and on overall agricultural production while at present hedgerow functioning is being analysed for itself correlatedly with the impact of fields on hedgerows. French agricultural research first displayed an interest in the bocage in 1964 with a conference held in Rennes on the impact of hedges on bioclimatic and agronomic factors. An analysis of the papers published in subsequent years highlights the drift from the initial reasons that justified research to present research concerns. Some aspects, such as the relations between livestock farming and the bocage were never explored. Current research on the bocage displays two trends: -- research that attributes the bocage objective environmental usefulness as a resilience factor for biophysical systems: this is supported by environmental scientists in landscape ecology, hydrology and soil science in particular; -- research that invests the bocage with a subjective function expressing a specific connection with nature from a landscape, historical, patrimonial or even fantasy perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge systems in agriculture need to devise new forms of collaboration between farmers, development agents and researchers in the current socio-economic context in which the social functions of agriculture are being questioned. So far very few research studies have addressed the issue of the knowledge content to be produced in such situations. Our paper rests on the hypothesis that the synergy between the empirical knowledge of producers and scientific knowledge is able to generate new agronomic knowledge. We explored this new form of knowledge production by examining two situations: saffron cultivation in southwestern France and French truffle production, for which the technical management is a major hindrance to their development. We show that neither scientific nor empirical knowledge on their own are sufficient to improve it. On the basis of an "engineering of agronomic knowledge" approach that makes explicit and combines knowledges from different sources, we then propose four modes of synergy: (1) translating the objectives and practices of producers into action-oriented scientific questions; (2) scientifically grounding heuristic knowledge by referring it to explicative scientific knowledge; (3) linking the indicators used by the producers to scientifically measurable parameters; (4) selecting on a scientific basis appropriate equivalent plants for transposing knowledge from one to the other. These four modes are then discussed; it is underlined that this cognitive approach to the synergy between empirical and scientific knowledge could effectively be completed by analysing the socio-organisational settings in which this knowledge finds its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]