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A “silent” agroecology: the significance of unrecognized sociotechnical changes made by French farmers

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Abstract

Agroecology has been a focus of intense debate in France since 2012, when the idea was explicitly adopted as a national policy objective by the Ministry of Agriculture. This article intervenes in this debate by documenting and describing an under-recognized, “silent” agroecology practiced by conventional farmers contending with a variety of threats—economic, technical, and climatic—to their farming systems. Inspired by the sociology of development, the research summarized here shows how these farmers have relied on peer-to-peer cooperation, and specifically on formal equipment-sharing arrangements, to develop a range of practices allowing for the ecological improvement of their farming systems. These farmers make few claims with regard to the environmental benefits of their innovations, however: instead, they emphasize their desire for improved farm autonomy. Out of respect for the social and professional dynamics within which they operate, moreover, these farmers tend to avoid ecological terms and topics in their peer-to-peer conversations. This “silence” is reinforced by the statistical tools used to report on French agriculture, which make little note of such farmers’ activities, effectively excluding these practices from assessments of the ecologization of French agriculture. Finally, given the challenges these farmers face in locating necessary resources elsewhere in the agrifood sector (suppliers, research and development, markets), the ecological benefits of these new practices are not always fully realized. Nevertheless, the scale and significance of this silent agroecology—the conditions for which are also present in other Western countries—suggest an urgent need to reorient public policy frameworks to better support the agroecological transition.

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Data availability

The data are verbatim of interviews. Given the monographic nature of the research, the interviews cannot be anonymized. The data are therefore not available.

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Notes

  1. The term ecologization refers to the growing importance of environmental issues within agricultural policies and practices (Mormont 2009).

  2. This despite a near doubling of the percentage of farmland under organic management from 2012 to 2018 (reaching 7.5% of French agricultural land area), in part as a response to the economic crises impacting agriculture during this period (Agence Bio 2019).

  3. CETA: Centre d'études techniques agricoles-Center for the study of agricultural techniques; GDA: Groupe de développement agricole-Agricultural development group. CETA and GDA are the two main types of local farmers’ discussion groups in France, existing since the post-war period, and variously present in different regions.

  4. In 2009, there was a significant fall in milk prices.

  5. Roundup® is the brand name of one of the most common herbicides containing glyphosate.

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Acknowledgements

I extend my thanks to all the farmers and CUMAs representatives I met with and whose generous participation made this work possible. I would also like to thank everyone who encouraged and enriched my thinking for this paper, including my supervisors (P. Gasselin and J.D. van der Ploeg), colleagues (especially J.M. Barbier, C. Bosc and M. Mormont), and the two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Laura Sayre for the translation, and J.P. Ranquet.

Funding

This research received funding from the French Ministry of Agriculture under the CASDAR program (Projet CapVert 2014-2017, Projet Luz’Co 2016-2019), from ADEME/REACCTIF program (Capaccita 2016-2019), and from the ANR (IDAE 2016-2019).

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  1. UMR Innovation, University of Montpellier, CIRAD, INRAE, Institut Agro, Montpellier, France

    Véronique Lucas

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Lucas, V. A “silent” agroecology: the significance of unrecognized sociotechnical changes made by French farmers. Rev Agric Food Environ Stud 102, 1–23 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41130-021-00140-4

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