How agroecological farmers develop their own practices: a grid to describe the objects and mechanisms of learning
Résumé
The agroecological transition - defined here as a transition toward practices based on the
management of ecological processes - requires innovations involving a wide range of
stakeholders, from farmers to scientists or intermediaries. An extensive literature has shown
that agroecological farmers’ practices cannot be exclusively based on the application and adaptation of general recipes to the specific context of their farms: for intermediaries, supporting farmers thus calls for op
ening innovation spaces in which they can develop their own practices and generate innovative agroecological knowledge rooted in their peculiar agroecosystem. As a consequence, we argue that it is important to better understand how this knowledge is developed. However, the ways in which farmers learn remain poorly investigated at the individual level. The major role of experience in learning leads us to build on Kolb’s
pragmatist theory and to consider the individual learning process as a continuous interplay
between a farmer’s experience and his or her capacity for action. The purpose of this paper is to propose an analytical grid to describe the mechanisms connecting the farmer’s experience and his pragmatic judgements. To do so, we focused on the case of conservation agriculture. We conducted five semi-structured interviews with experienced farmers and qualitatively analysed them. The resulting grid exposes an array of learning mechanisms as well as the objects they may be linked with. This analytical gridmay, in the future, be applied to a wider sample of farmers, as a means to better grasp the possible diversity of their learning processes. A deeper understanding of these processes would then help intermediaries to identify which types of support are the most adequate for farmers engaged in the agroecological transition.