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Given the huge challenges agriculture has to face, both in Northern and Southern countries, a radical change in farming practices towards agroecology is required. Most scientific literature on the design of new farming systems describes de novo approaches, which focus on disruption and novelty, without any concern for the way to move from the current system to the innovative one. In this study, we highlight, for the first time, the particular traits of what we will call the step-by-step design approach.

Davide Bellone, Antoine Gardarin, Muriel Valantin‑Morison, Alan Kergunteuil, Foteini G. Pashalidou, Agronomy for Sustainable Development (2023) 43:20

Experimentation conducted by or with agronomists on farmers' farms is not a fixed methodology, and even less a one-size-fits-all one. There is a wide diversity of ways of implementing experimental protocols, carrying out monitoring and evaluation, and making use of the results. This article proposes an analysis of this diversity via a review of the scientific literature and the identification of 7 types of on-farm experimentation practices.

In a decree issued in 2019, the French government defined mandatory pesticide-free buffer zones near residential buildings in order to limit the exposure of residents to pesticides. However, the amount of agricultural area and the crop species grown close to residential buildings had never been studied before in France. This knowledge gap has recently been filled by a team of researchers and teacher-researchers from our lab (UMR Agronomie). They show the amount of agricultural area and crop types within pesticide-free buffer zones around residential buildings vary greatly depending on agricultural regions and the size of buffer zones.

In arable crops, birds often occupy the highest position in the food chain, feeding on pests (phytophagous insects that attack crops) and their intermediate predators, mainly insects and other arthropods (such as spiders), that feed on these pests. The effects of bird predation on insect pest populations are difficult to estimate without a complete description of prey-predator communities and their complex interactions.

Landscape management is often seen as one of the levers to be used to improve pest management. However, the complexity of interactions makes it difficult to establish general rules, and, depending on the pests studied, landscape elements can have opposite effects, which have been reported in numerous scientific publications. In this study we link French epidemiological surveillance data for 30 of the main pests of French field crops with national maps of tree and field crop areas.

This paper focuses on characterising the variability of camelina yield and quality gains under different pedoclimatic conditions in northern France and identifying factors explaining this variability.

Quentin Toffolini, Marie-Hélène Jeuffroy, Jean-Marc Meynard, Julie Borg, Jérôme Enjalbert, Arnaud Gauffreteau, Isabelle Goldringer, Amélie Lefèvre, Chantal Loyce, Philippe Martin, Chloé Salembier, Véronique Souchère, Muriel Valantin-Morison, Gaëlle van Frank, Lorène Prost, 2020, Agricultural Systems, Volume 185

Annabelle Richard, Marion Casagrande, Marie-Hélène Jeuffroy & Christophe David, 2020. Agronomy for Sustainable Development volume 40, Article 26

Combining the richness of a participatory approach involving all the stakeholders of a territory with the power of simulation tools: this is the originality of the approach that was implemented on the scale of the "Langrois plateau", in order to assess its potential for the reintroduction of legumes.