Facilitating agroecosystem resilience : study of local agricultural knowledge Resilience 2014 -Montpellier

Résumé En

What are the farmers representations of soil quality indicators ? Which of them do they know? Which of them do they use? Ten farmers in a French rural department (Cévennes lozériennes) were interviewed between 2012 and 2013. It's an homogeneous field according to geomorphological caracteristics. The farmers comply with the specifications of the "Nature et Progrès" label, which is more binding than the organic label, especially as far as environmental standards are concerned. They practice gGardening on "terrasses". They participate in traditional landscape maintaing through agricultural practices in stressful mountainous environment. Semi-structured enquiries and participant observation on farmers'soil fertility practices. Farmers are set up between 2 years to 40 years and are 25 to nearly 60 years old. An ethnographic study was conducted to identify the farmers' representations of soil quality indicators, allegedly used as decision-making tools in a fragile mountain environment. => Representations are here assumed as at the origin of social practices of nature (Descola, 1986). => Indicators are here chosen as interdisciplinary boundary-object (Trompette et Vinck, 2009) to link agronomy and anthropology, among others. Farmers' agronomy notion oversteps the strictly technical data to go beyond the scope of global ecosociosystem sustainability. This work, by questioning the epistemological bases of the investigated production system, opens the way to think twice about the resilience given by an agriculture which is required to "produce differently."