By Olivier Billaud, Emmanuelle Porcher, and Etienne Maclouf.
To work more effectively with farmland biodiversity, farmers need to develop their own practices, adapted to their local context. The extreme complexity of biodiversity makes its actions and services difficult to anticipate, leading to considerable uncertainty for farmers. For example, will predators control a pest, or should the farmer use a chemical treatment at the risk of affecting the rest of the biodiversity? To work with this uncertainty, farmers need to develop a feeling of trust towards biodiversity’s action, accepting their vulnerability and the impossibility of controlling everything.
Our assertions are the result of a national-scale French citizen science study, where farmers monitored the biodiversity of their fields. Our study revealed that despite the will of farmers and national entities (ministry and researchers), the programme failed to produce general knowledge and determine prescriptive practices that could be applied in all farms. On the contrary, here we highlighted the farmers’ informal knowledge that came directly from their experience, trials and observations. To work with biodiversity, farmers adapted the scientific knowledge and developed their own practices locally adjusted to their farm. The importance of local knowledge challenged the actual knowledge production system, where farmers merely apply knowledge that agronomic institutes develop.
Finally, our results showed that working with biodiversity requires accepting a leap into the unknown. Farmers must trust the action of biodiversity, thus making themselves “vulnerable” to the possible responses of the ecosystems to a change in farming practices. They lost the control acquired thanks to industrial agriculture through the use of chemistry, genetics and motorisation. This leap into the unknown is a real social and economic difficulty and must be taken into account in future policies for the agriculture ecological transition.
Relational Thinking 