Agroecological Transition of farmer collectives in the Pilat Natural Regional Park

Abstract

As our contemporary intensive agricultural models readily approach the biophysical boundaries of the Earth system, social and technical innovations are inevitably required to meet future food demand. Agroecology can be a promising approach to design and manage more sustainable agroecosystems, but it requires a major reconsideration of farmers’ knowledge construction processes. Bottom-up initiatives, farmer-to-farmer exchanges, and peer learning groups play a key role in generating this knowledge. Collective initiatives of farmers aiming at experimenting alternative practices on farm and supported by external actors can therefore favor the agroecological transition. Ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews were conducted with two farmer collectives from the Pilat Natural Regional Park in France, in order to describe, evaluate and further the agroecological transition occurring in these local groups. The results of the study showed that agroecology is usually a silent but existing concept in farmer collectives, but doesn’t necessarily lead to the whole transformation of agricultural systems. This study identified how professionals from the agricultural sector could favor the agroecological orientation of farmer collectives.