The transition to conservation agriculture: an insularization process towards sustainability

Abstract

Part of the Sustainability Transition Studies, this work addresses the question of the relationship between niches and regimes by examining the transition to conservation agriculture. It seeks to understand how farmers’ transition to conservation agriculture can contribute to a better understanding of the transition of agro-food systems towards sustainability. Based on an analysis of farmers’ trajectories in the Walloon region in Belgium, the paper develops the notion of insularization in order to characterize the emergence of conservation agriculture as a niche that is a dynamic process, growing from within and progressively detaching itself from the conventional agricultural regime. The analysis of farmers’ transition shows how, after an initial phase of destabilization of the conventional ploughing regime, learning and experiencing processes can lead to a transformation in soil and soil quality management perceptions. Our hypothesis is that this cognitive transformation constitutes a tipping point in the insularization process because of its effects on agricultural practices, which increase the detachment of conservation agriculture from the regime and thus embed the irreversibility and sustainability of the transition. Insularization describes an ecologizational pathway of agricultural practices endogenous to the regime that can not only lead to adaptive changes on the periphery of the system, but might also induce a deep and systemic transformation of conventional agricultural practices.

Keywords:

• conservation agriculture
• sustainability transition studies
• multi-level perspective
• niche – regime
• insularization

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Frédéric Goulet for his collaboration on the elaboration of the notion of insularization. We are grateful to Marc Mormont, Esther Goidts and Aline Dejonckheere for their useful feedback on previous versions of the paper. We also wish to thank the ASBL Greenotec for its collaboration in our fieldwork investigation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The word ‘biotechnological’ is used as defined by Buttel (2003) and Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson (1987): a model in which the intensive use of external inputs leads to an ‘artificialization’ process through which agro-food systems become detached from nature.

2. We use the word ‘polarise’ to highlight that there are clearly opposing approaches to the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, there is no neutral technology (De Schutter, 2010; Marsden, 2012). Scholars, such as Jordan and Davis (2015), attempt to show how some concepts can bring both paradigms into dialogue, such as the concept of sustainable intensification that tries to blur the boundaries between agriculture, ecology and agroecological intensification (Pretty & Bharucha, 2014; Wezel, Soboksa, McClelland, Delespesse, & Boissau, 2015) and the concept of ecological intensification (Griffon, 2013). We do not have the space here to discuss these attempts and the ways in which they underestimate some major conflicts in the co-existence of these two paradigms. These conflicts are mainly related to the socio-technological locking of conventional food systems (Stassart & Jamar, 2008; Vanloqueren & Baret, 2009) and to the pathways (Lampkin et al., 2015) used to overcome this locking, in respect of which knowledge building is crucial.

3. http://www.fao.org/ag/ca/.

4. In French, ‘innovation par retrait’ (Goulet & Vinck, 2012).

5. Our hypothesis relates to the specific case of conservation agriculture in the Walloon region. In other contexts, the development of conservation agriculture might have been such that it cannot be considered as a niche marking a break from the dominant agricultural regime.

6. In French: ‘innovation par retrait'.

7. All the farmers’ names have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

8. The French terms ‘sol vivant’ (‘living soil’) and ‘sol mort’ (‘dead soil’) are used by many farmers and by protagonists of the French Conservation Agriculture movement, such as Claude Bourguignon and Frédéric Thomas.

9. We acknowledge that many soil scientists are aware of the living dimension of soil. Nevertheless, there is often a gap between this perception and its implementation in terms of practices and production of knowledge such as the development of systemic knowledge on ecological processes and on their interaction with reduced tillage systems; the building of local references that allow for consideration of environmental influences (microbiological communities, biotope) on ecological processes; and the assessment and creation of observation methods and objects for evaluating the functionality of these processes. These scientific practices are needed in order to articulate ecology and pedology around the agronomic and ecological processes (De Tourdonnet, Brives, Denis, Omon, & Thomas, 2013).

10. Although we do not to address this issue in this paper, we should mention that the notion of ‘good soil’ and its associated notions of ‘soil fertility’ and ‘soil quality’ are complex and polysemic (e.g. see Bastida et al. 2008; Patzel et al. 2000). They lie at the core of contemporary sustainable soil management issues and related scientific controversies (Schjønning, 2004; Sojka & Upchurch, 1999).

11. The notion of ‘functional biodiversity’ has been developed mainly in work on agroecology (e.g., Altieri, 1993; Altieri & Nicholls, 1998) and agrosystem services (e.g. Moonen & Barberi, 2008). There are many interpretations of the term ‘functional biodiversity’ (Moonen & Barberi, 2008). In this paper, we use it to describe the way farmers see the biological life in soil and, more widely, the biodiversity in the environment as playing essential roles in agricultural production. It is important to note, however, that the term is seldom used by farmers.

12. See, for example, Techniques Culturales Simplifiées, 51, January/February 2009.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Service Public de Wallonie (SPW) within the SAS-STRAT research project in the European SNOWMAN network.