Mapping available agricultural equipment to enable farmers' and manufacturers' interactions for an agroecological transition. The case of legume crops in Hauts-de-France region.
Creators: name: Kefi, Souha
name: Rizzo, Davide
name: Havet, jean-Baptiste
name: Postic, Clément
name: Dubois, Michel J.F.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Forage crops
Transformative research
Multi-actor approach

description: In the broad spectrum of the shift towards sustainable agriculture, the agroecological transition is widely targeted by policy guidelines and addressed by Western European farmers. Among the most known transformative factors are plant breeding, achievement of nitrogen autonomy, crop diversification and agricultural equipment. Insofar, the latter appears to be widely neglected in the literature. The availability of suited machinery and implements might be the most straightforward prerequisite for developing and deploying agroecological farming practices and cropping systems. This is to decrease the existing gap between the design of equipment and farming systems. In this vein, protein production raises specific challenges for the cropping systems. The main goal of this study is to achieve a shared perspective between farmers and machinery manufacturers. This study contributes to the design of an analytical framework for adapting the equipment to the agroecological transition for legume crops. Our case study is in northern France (Hauts-de-France region), characterized by large crop farms (27,400 farms with an average area of 78.5 ha which is 1.4 higher than the national average) and engaged in the quest for protein autonomy. As so, we will focus on the availability of agricultural equipment for forage legumes in the region. It will require involving multiple agricultural actors concerned with the agroecological transition, especially from the agricultural equipment sector. We carried out two parallel actions. On one hand, we retrieved all the institutional and commercial structures in the region based on documents available online to map the actors in the region and the possible interactions between them. On the other hand, we carried out an exhaustive inventory of all the 166 dealers in the region as experts to describe the available agricultural equipment for local farmers. The output of these two actions of information will be an integrative knowledge base. To study the interactions between these actors, as well as to check the equipment availability and their adaptation to agroecological transition, we conducted about twenty semi-directive surveys. The main result will be a mapping of stakeholders and a catalogue of available equipment as an intermediate object to represent the sector considering all its complexity, thus mixing agronomic and social sciences towards a shared perspective.
description: This work is part of S.K.'s PhD thesis. It contributes to the activities of the Agro-Machinisme et Nouvelles Technologies Chair, UniLaSalle, with the financial support of the Michelin Corporate Foundation, AGCO – Massey-Ferguson, the Kuhn Group, and the Hauts-de-France Regional Council (FEDER funds). S.K. benefits also from a research allocation from the Hauts-de-France Region for the years 2020–2023.