TRACKING INNOVATION CROPPING SYSTEMS DESIGNED BY FARMERS J.M. Meynard, INRA, France, meynard@grignon.inra.fr Abstract Farmers are very inventive, but their innovations often remain confined to their farm, or to small local networks. And the interest they might have for farmers other than their inventors is seldom analyzed. Tracking on-farm innovations aims at finding technical or organizational innovations designed by farmers, to characterize their agronomic, economic and environmental performance and analyze the conditions in which this performance is expressed. The talk presents the various stages of this tracking approach, applied to innovative cropping systems, basing on a variety of recent works, in France, Argentine, Burkina Faso and China: (1) Defining what we are looking for; (2) Identifying innovative systems; (3) Describing and characterizing innovative systems; (4) Assessing innovative systems; (5) Specifying the conditions for the success of innovative systems. The results of the tracking are aimed not only at the farmers, but at their advisors and researchers too: (i) Innovative and effective cropping systems, which can be a source of inspiration for farmers; (ii) Confirmation of the interest of a principle for reasoning cropping systems; (iii) Innovative practices, analyzed within a systemic framework, which can serve as bricks for the design of new systems; (iv) Questions to be looked into more thoroughly by experimentation. Compared to traditional approaches in agronomy, tracking innovative cropping systems provides a double break: break with a topdown approach, where agricultural R & D is regarded as the only source of innovation: by mobilizing the innovative capacities of farmers, tracking increases our collective capacity to invent new practices or new cropping systems, by using not only technical and scientific knowledge, but also the empirical knowledge, that is so rich in agriculture. And break with the primacy given to experimentation, as a source for the production of knowledge and the assessment of innovations. ________________________________ Farmers are very inventive, but their innovations often remain confined to their farm, or to small local networks. And the interest they might have for farmers other than their inventors is seldom analyzed. Tracking on-farm innovations aims at finding technical or organizational innovations designed by farmers, to characterize their agronomic, economic and environmental performance and analyze the conditions in which this performance is expressed. Then the results of this analysis could be shared with other farmers, in participatory design processes. The talk presents the various stages of this tracking approach, applied to innovative cropping systems, basing on a variety of recent works, in France, Argentine, Burkina Faso and China. Step 1: Defining what we are looking for We are interested here in cropping systems, or in crop management, in other words, consistent combinations of practices. We want them to be innovative, that is to say different from what most people know, and more particularly of course, different from what the tracking initiator knows. Generally, they will be innovative because their inventors have developed them in response to original aims. In the tracking studies, we found 3 main ways of defining what we are looking for :
1. We are looking for systems that are more sustainable than the dominant systems in a given region: a precondition to tracking is the characterization of the “dominant” systems . 2. We are looking for combinations of practices, which enable a problem to be controlled: For example, how to reduce pesticides? How to control weeds in organic farming? 3. We want to know more about a practice that is not indexed in the literature and not well-known by the experts: its interest for producers, its implementation methods, its insertion in the cropping systems… Step 2: Identifying innovative systems This is not easy, because really innovative systems are rare. The most usual method of identifying them is based on an exploration of the networks of actors: we ask the people involved if they know producers developing systems that correspond to the tracking objective, or failing this, if they can indicate other actors likely to know such producers. Gradually, we identify the innovative producers and their systems. An important choice is that of the “network heads”, the people to be approached first: it is essential to choose a variety of them, in order to multiply the networks explored; if we stay in the networks we know, we will only find the innovations we know. Even those that we have advised! It is also possible to sort innovative systems through a database, with a performance indicator. This method depends on the quality of the database, and on the criteria it contains.
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