A participatory method for the design and integrated assessment of crop-livestock systems in farmers’ groups

Summary

Crop-livestock integration promises more sustainable farming systems, but is constrained by organiza-tional and technical issues at the farm level. Developing locally-adapted crop-livestock systems betweenspecialized farms remains theoretical due to a lack of methods for their design and of analysis of benefitsand limits for their monitoring. This article presents a method for participatory design and assessmentof territorial crop-livestock systems and its application to a group of organic farmers specialized in cropor livestock production in southwestern France. We developed an adapted assessment framework forterritorial crop-livestock systems. We used it firstly to produce a diagnosis of strengths and weaknessesof farming systems then to identify the potential for new crop-livestock interactions between farms andfinally we designed and assessed crop-livestock integration scenarios with farmers. The technical andorganizational options for change were selected to satisfy objectives of partners, illustrated by specificperformance criteria (biological regulation, work management economic viability, social learning andcapacity building, embeddedness of agriculture in the territory, integration in public policies). This studyshows the crucial role of an adaptive methodology that includes ad hoc indicators to support the design ofsustainable farming systems that considers specific agroecosystem, constraints and objectives of farmers.