Vers des systèmes économes en intrants : quelles trajectoires et quel accompagnement pour les producteurs en grandes cultures

Comment faire face aux attentes en matière de réduction de l’utilisation des intrants ? En grandes cultures, certains agriculteurs et conseillers ont d’ores et déjà développé de nouvelles pratiques allant dans le sens d’une telle réduction. Des entretiens réalisés auprès d’agriculteurs de trois zones de grandes cultures (Eure, Indre et Oise) et un travail de formation-action mené avec de conseillers de Chambres d’Agriculture dans le cadre du réseau mixte technologique « systèmes de culture innovants » nous permettent de caractériser la diversité des changements mis en oeuvre dans les exploitations, les processus d’apprentissage qui les accompagnent pour les agriculteurs, l’évolution du métier qui se dessine pour les conseillers. La construction d’espaces d’échange et d’expérimentation est une ressource clé qui permet aux uns et aux autres de réduire les incertitudes pratiques, cognitives et sociales auxquels ils se trouvent confrontés
How to comply with the new expectations of the French government regarding a reduction in the use of pesticides? Some farmers and advisers working in arable crops areas have already engaged in developing new practices which aim at reducing the use of inputs (pesticides as well as nitrogen or fuel). We chose to combine agronomists’ and social scientists’ approaches to investigate among such farmers who work within three different areas (Eure, Indre, Oise districts). Our aim was to capture and understand their long-term paths, the changes which occurred along those paths, the learning processes which supported such changes. We also carried an action-training program among some advisers working in the Chambres of Agriculture, whose program was supported by a R&D network called “innovative cropping systems”. In the present paper, we identify a diversity of paths according to some sociological and agronomic criteria and discuss this diversity in the light of the efficiency-substitution-redesign framework. We then show that (i) collective advise, (ii) farmer‘s own information search; (iii) on-farm trials carried on by the farmer, on his own or with the support of peers or of an adviser, are key in the development of new practices at farm level. We finally present the diverse situations acknowledged by the advisers as requiring different skills and resources to provide an efficient technical advice as well as their appraisal of the uncertainty regarding the change of their professional model. We finally suggest that the development of low-input practices will be facilitated if farmers as well as advisers can find some discussion and experimentation spaces in which they get means to overcome the practical, cognitive and social uncertainties they face in changing their professional practices