Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Okoba and De Graaff, 2005; Moges and
Holdenn, 2007). However, these studies
most often identify how farmers see their
soils in order to make agricultural advis-
ory services more relevant, and thus more
efficient in advising farmers on specific
points such as soil erosion or loss of soil
fertility. The present approach is original
in that it does not consider a predefined
problem but is concerned with farmers'
overall understanding of their own soils
inĀ order to identify the role SOM or SOC
represents for them. This comparative ap-
proach also makes it possible to highlight
how these conceptions are specific to par-
ticular modes of agricultural production.
It further allows us to observe how farm-
ers develop their own way of thinking
about soils, as well as to gauge the degree
of the homogeneity of these ideas and ap-
proaches.
The results (Compagnone et al ., forth-
coming) showed that these farmers were
only marginally concerned with C se-
questration by soils as a form to mitigate
climate change; rather, they expressed
themselves in a practical way, useful to
their peers in similar production schemes.
In the same way, these farmers did not
mention 'soil health'. Soil can be 'good'
or 'bad', 'well' or 'badly maintained', or
'worked', but it is never described as healthy
or sick, unlike the crops or residues that
are on its surface.
Strictly speaking, different farmers
have different conceptions of the import-
ance of OM to the soil, depending on which
production method they employ. Its inter-
est for no-till farmers is in stimulating the
biological activity of the soil and improving
and regulating its structure. The aim of
these farmers is, for instance, to increase
the OM content of their soils from 4 to 5%.
The problem is different for organic farm-
ers: since they are not able to use synthetic
fertilizers, OM inputs constitute their pri-
mary source of nutrient input. The major
question for them relates to how essential
nutrients are made available to the plant as
effectively as possible. Lastly, for conven-
tional agriculture farmers, this question of
OM has no special meaning, but ranks on
the same level as mineral fertilization or
calcic amendments. Although these farm-
ers recognize that the OM content of soils
has to be increased so that the soil can con-
tinue 'to give', and questions of soil struc-
ture and life have been mentioned, they
consider that OM does not determine soil
productivity.
Finally, although all three groups
mentioned the importance of the 'life of
the soil', this concept was most present
for farmers practicing no-till. For these
farmers, the term 'biological' concerns the
natural dynamism particular to the life of
the soil, complex and multiple in its form,
whereas farmers in organic farming use
the same term to refer to a practice which
prohibits the use of agrochemicals. The
statement of the need to produce new
technical references that are consistent
with their production methods is associ-
ated with the assertion of the central role
of OM in the soil by these two types of
farmers. They generally criticize standard
technical and scientific frameworks and
their relevance to their particular pro-
duction systems. However, this criticism
leads no-till farmers to a production pro-
cess of knowledge and expertise, while
organic farmers call on agronomic re-
search, at the same time underlining their
difficulty in integrating and making use
of technical and scientific language. The
organic farmers in this study thus dif-
fered from farmers converted to organic
practices at an earlier stage, who were re-
ported as being strongly involved in the
generation of local knowledge (Hellec and
Blouet, 2012).
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr Jean-Paul Aeschli-
mann, Dr Jane C. Williams, Dr Jean-Luc
Denizieux, Dr Susan Greenwood Etienne
and Dr Eleanor Milne for their help with
the English translation and editing. They
are also very grateful to Prof Elke Noelle-
meyer, Prof Steve A. Banwart and DrĀ Eleanor
Milne for their helpful comments and
advice.
 
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