Managing experimental networks to support the design of crop mixtures: lessons from 11 cases

Summary

Agriculture face sustainability-related challenges and agroecology is put forward as a potential future model callling for novel designs of on-farm farming systems and for the renewal of methods used by agricultural R&D to support these processes (Meynard et al., 2012). Design requires that farmers and stakeholders organize to acquire knowledge and know-how on agroecological systems, such as species mixtures. Through several decades, experimentation has been the most widespread scientific method to generate knowledge to support re-design (e.g. Ronner et al., 2019; Vereijken, 1997). To foster agroecology in practice, an increasing number of articles insists on the importance to develop participatory experiments (e.g. Snapp, 2002) and to value the interests of experimental networks (ENs), i.e. articulating experiments in different agricultural situations (e.g. Navarrete et al., 2018). However, as far as we know, no work focused on the contributions of such ENs to redesign in agriculture. Given these statements, in this research, our objective is to shed light on relations between ways of managing an EN, and its contributions to the design of agroecological systems.