Organic farmers’ reality to manage functional agrobiodiversity in European organic apple orchards.

Summary

According to its principles and standards, organic farming particularly rely on natural processes and functional agro-biodiversity (FAB) to benefit from essential ecosystem
services. However, these processes are mostly complex, hardly visible and site-specific, thereby making it difficult to assess and manage on-farm. A European survey has been carried out among organic farmers and emphasizes the variability among countries with a diversity of techniques targeting different functional groups according to farming contexts and farmers’ expectations. The different criteria used by farmers to evaluate FAB techniques efficiency and implementation potential clearly illustrate the difficulty to assess the agroecosystem as a whole.