Experiments on the use of knowledge management tools for agriculture

Summary

Agriculture must be both sustainable and economically viable. Sustainable agriculture requires new knowledge and expertise. However, knowledge management is not sufficient in current sustainable agriculture. To overcome this, we have made the assumption that the knowledge management practices used in industry can be transferred in agriculture. In this paper, we propose to apply to agriculture, the methodological tools developed by the French knowledge management group. These tools are based on theoretical approaches for the transformation of explicit and tacit knowledge within an organization. These tools are generic and suitable for any knowledge. We have tested the tool CFK for knowledge criticality in order to identify the knowledge to make explicit within a farm. This knowledge is critical because they are valuable, rare, complex and difficult to formalize. They must therefore be managed. We have determined the criticality of knowledge in a farm for organic agriculture field crops, in prairies and on various flora grain legumes. In the French research project TATABOX related to the agro-ecological transition study in a land between Tarn and Aveyron in France, we also have experimented another methodological tool (TRACO) for characterizing the most appropriate knowledge transfer tools to use between an agricultural cooperative and farmers. Among 16 knowledge transfer methods proposed, TRACO allow highlighting supervised self-education but also traditional teaching courses, communities of practices and workshops. Our conclusion is that the proposed knowledge management tools seem relevant to manage knowledge in agriculture, but they still require training and adaptation to agricultural fields.