Use of videos to characterize farmers’ knowledge of tillage with horses and share it to promote agroecological innovations in French vineyards

Résumé En

During agroecological transition, farmers test and adjust new cropping practices that can enhance the ecosystem services of their agrosystems. Supporting farmers to change their practices requires a description and understanding of the step-by-step design of innovations, and the learning processes that unfold with the farmers’ actions. Our research focuses on the re-introduction of horse-drawn tillage in viticulture, during on-farm experimentation involving the collaboration of a service provider. Our objective is to show how our research approach, based on the use of videos, allows us to access, characterize, and share the knowledge embodied and mobilized in situ by the service providers, considered here as farmers. To do so, we mobilized the methods of the course-of-action research program. First, we filmed the hilling operations performed by two service providers on thirteen plots. We then conducted self-confrontation interviews to highlight their implicit and invisible activity. Next, we conducted an allo-confrontation interview with a third service provider to validate/invalidate and complete the knowledge mobilized during the hilling activity. Finally, through a comparative analysis, we developed a first provisional qualitative modeling of the hilling activity. We thus show that the equine traction service providers used not only visual cues but also sound, tactile, and relational cues with the horse, to adjust their practices; and we illustrate the advantages of using videos to decompose the individual activity of service providers, to then share and compare this activity with those of peers, and, finally, to recompose the hilling activity in a qualitative model by identifying key dimensions structuring the activity. The use of digital technology makes it possible to construct data on farmers’ learning processes as they change their practice to support agroecological innovations. The material produced and the insights gained can contribute to the building of digital resource banks that are valuable tools for training.