In this diversity of approaches to agroecology, its operational implementation raises a key question: How to mobilize the organisms that underpin the ecological processes that we would like to activate? From an agronomist or farmer viewpoint, these living organisms exhibit some flaws when we seek to mobilize and incorporate them into agricultural systems. We can distinguish five such flaws.
First, these organisms are often little known in the context of the cultivated field, a situation that stems from the fact that agronomy has, for some time now, moved away from the study of the biological component and, during the same period, ecology has drifted away from the study of agrosystems (Chevassus-au-Louis, 2006). Building scientific knowledge of these biological objects is therefore a key issue for the research community, but the challenge is also to take advantage of the secular knowledge that exists of these objects, especially in the forms of agriculture in which there still exists a high level of biodiversity in cultivated systems, now found mainly in the Global South (Altieri and Toledo, 2011). It is therefore necessary to hybridize scientific knowledge with operational knowledge and expert knowledge, so that they can together lead to transformations in farmers’ practices and agricultural systems (Girard, 2014). The construction of the necessary
knowledge must therefore be based not only on scientific work, but also on mechanisms of co-design and participatory research (Warner, 2008; Meynard
et al., 2012; Berthet et al., 2015).
Second, living organisms are sensitive to the environment and practices. A technological artefact, on the other hand, owes in part its large-scale success to the fact that its use is decontextualized, i.e. insensitive to the context, which makes it possible to include it in a standard technical package, easier to implement, and thus to disseminate. Living organisms often resist similar inclusion in a technical package, as they maintain many relationships critical to their very existence with the environment around them, thus making them very sensitive to context. And since each process is unique, universal recipes cannot simply be applied. It is necessary, of course, to have generic knowledge, but the actors must also build situated knowledge, put in place specific modes of learning, based in particular on the ability to decontextualize and then re-contextualize (Brives and de Tourdonnet, 2010; Brives et al., 2015).
Third, living organisms are sometimes difficult to control (Figure 4.1) because their numbers and activity respond to ecological processes that are hard to manage (population dynamics, among others). For example, a cover plant may not grow well or, on the contrary, grow too abundantly, or a drought may put a stop to earthworm activity. This control can be achieved or attempted through direct management of the organism concerned (for example, by controlling the date of planting and density of a cover crop), but most often, habitat management is involved (by planting cover crops that promote earthworm activity, for example). These indirect management methods, which can find inspiration in integrated protection and biological control through habitat management, are based on a detailed knowledge of the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecological processes. They can often lead to effects that overflow the scale of the plot to outside the field’s boundaries and, even further, to the landscape as a whole (Baudry, 1993; Francis, 2003).
Figure 4.1. A humorous illustration of an organism mobilized in an agroecological system and which has escaped all control (Goulet, 2012) © Erik Tartrais
Fourth, organisms mobilized for agroecology sometimes have unintended effects because their interactions with the ecosystem are not limited to the functions for which they have been mobilized. A cover plant sown to choke weeds may become a weed itself if left to seed or may become a pathogen host (Carof et al., 2007). It is necessary to be able to identify and sometimes counteract these effects, so that the service expected from the organism does not become counterproductively damaging. Risk management thus becomes a key element of agroecological innovation.
Finally, the effects of the mobilized organisms are often not very visible or are perceived too late. How can the symbiotic fixation of a cover legume or
the porosity created by earthworms be evaluated, for example? The mobilization of organisms therefore requires the development of methods to observe and assess their effects in relation to the agrosystem’s functioning and the expected benefits. This type of method, developed for example in the context of integrated protection, is often not available when it comes to soil organisms (Blanchart et al., 2005; Scopel et al., 2013; Hellec et al., 2015). The challenge is to find indicators and modes of perceiving the essential functions provided by the organisms of interest within the agrosystem.
Thus, the characteristics of biological organisms mobilized in a process of transition to agroecology contrast with those of modern artefacts of agriculture, i.e. agricultural equipment, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Their behaviour remains, above all, unpredictable. Their activity is difficult to contain in a framework (Callon, 1999); they require continuous monitoring and the ability to react to their overflows, which always remain possible.
These nature-objects are what Latour (1997) calls ‘hairy’ objects, because they have the ability to associate with a multiplicity of other objects and thus to exit the frameworks that had been expected of their activity. This ‘hairy’ aspect and this multiplicity of associations will generate new sources of questions, learning and actions. Thus, for example, a farmer using a cover plant for a few years as a nitrate trap can also discover this plant’s effects on the soil structure and become interested in the activity of earthworms in his plots, then potentially reduce tilling or plant other cover plants to boost the earthworms’ activity (de Tourdonnet et al., 2013). Many farmers who change their attitude as a result of engaging in an agroecological innovation process state that they have ‘become researchers’, that they have rediscovered ‘agronomy’.
This research attitude of the various actors marks the specificity of agroecological innovation. Unlike the implementation of modern objects, which presupposes a separation between their designers and their users (Hennion, 2013), that of the objects of agroecology is a privileged moment of knowledge production involving them. The distinction of roles between farmers and the scientists or technicians supporting them thus becomes blurred and reconfigured.