What brings an adapted ESR-based integrated approach of the farm to support conversion to organic farming?

Summary

Concerned by the impacts of agriculture on the environment, an increasing number of farms move to organic agriculture. This change in their evolution is more or less easy to manage, depending on their biophysical and economic context but also on their specific dynamics. In fact, some observers are worried about the survival of farms which convert without being sufficiently prepared, especially as the knowledge and tools needed to monitor such a change are not all operational. Numerous studies have been made on the multiple dimensions of the process of change occurring during the conversion, but few analyzed it with an integrated approach. Based on the adapted ESR framework (Hill and MacRae, 1995), we present in this article the preliminary results of a multi-scale integrated analysis of the changes occurring during the conversion to organic farming and highlight the diversity of these changes.