Une diversité de configurations d'apprentissage en situation de travail pour réduire l’usage des engrais et pesticides agricoles

« Développer une agriculture plus écologique », injonction prégnante des politiques territoriales actuelles, invite à s’interroger sur les conditions d’apprentissage des agriculteurs en situation de travail. Notre méthodologie, à l’interface entre didactique professionnelle et agronomie, s’appuie sur des entretiens auprès de vingt céréaliers français, qui ont réduit l’usage des pesticides et engrais au cours de leur carrière professionnelle. Pour analyser la configuration de conditions d’apprentissage accompagnant chaque changement de pratiques vers la réduction d’intrants, nous avons conçu un cadre d’analyse distinguant trois phases successives (la mise en alerte, l’expérience, et l’évaluation), en nous inspirant de la théorie de l’enquête de Dewey (1993). Chaque phase du processus d’apprentissage a été caractérisée par un ensemble de variables elles-mêmes déclinées en un ensemble de modalités. Une classification ascendante hiérarchique a permis d’identifier dix types de configurations de conditions d’apprentissage. Chaque agriculteur mobilise, au fil de sa carrière, plusieurs configurations-types combinant des formes d’expérience et des personnes ressources variées. Si en tendance les agriculteurs ont modifié leurs pratiques dans la proximité avec autrui, certaines configurations-types se déroulent en autonomie complète (20 % des cas) ce qui révèle à la fois un isolement de certains agriculteurs, et une capacité d’autres agriculteurs à combiner apprentissages en groupe et apprentissages en autonomie. L’identification que nous avons faite de configurations de conditions d’apprentissage constitue une approche originale pour traiter des apprentissages en situation de travail et offre des outils pour structurer un travail d’accompagnement des agriculteurs vers des systèmes de culture innovants.The need to develop a more ecological agriculture is a strong injunction in current territorial policies, which raises questions about farmers’ learning conditions in their work. Our methodology, at the interface between professional didactics and agronomy, is based on interviews with twenty French field crop farmers who have reduced their use of pesticides and fertilizers. To analyze the configuration of learning conditions under which each change in production methods was made, we have developed an analytical framework that distinguishes three stages (warning sign, experiencing, and evaluating), drawing inspiration from Dewey’s theory of inquiry (1993). Each stage of the learning process has been characterized by a set of variables, themselves characterized by a set of modalities. Hierarchical clustering serves to identify ten types of configuration of learning conditions. Throughout their careers, farmers mobilize several types of configuration involving various forms of experience and resource persons. Even though farmers have tended to change their practices when in contact with others, some types of configuration have become completely autonomous (20% of cases). This reveals both the isolation of some farmers and the ability of others to combine group learning and autonomous learning. Our identification of configurations of learning conditions is an original approach to addressing learning in working situations and provides tools to help farming consultants support shifts towards innovative cropping systems

Une diversité de configurations d'apprentissage en situation de travail pour réduire l’usage des engrais et pesticides agricoles

The need to develop a more ecological agriculture is a strong injunction in current territorial policies, which raises questions about farmers’ learning conditions in their work. Our methodology, at the interface between professional didactics and agronomy, is based on interviews with twenty French field crop farmers who have reduced their use of pesticides and fertilizers. To analyze the configuration of learning conditions under which each change in production methods was made, we have developed an analytical framework that distinguishes three stages (warning sign, experiencing, and evaluating), drawing inspiration from Dewey’s theory of inquiry (1993). Each stage of the learning process has been characterized by a set of variables, themselves characterized by a set of modalities. Hierarchical clustering serves to identify ten types of configuration of learning conditions. Throughout their careers, farmers mobilize several types of configuration involving various forms of experience and resource persons. Even though farmers have tended to change their practices when in contact with others, some types of configuration have become completely autonomous (20% of cases). This reveals both the isolation of some farmers and the ability of others to combine group learning and autonomous learning. Our identification of configurations of learning conditions is an original approach to addressing learning in working situations and provides tools to help farming consultants support shifts towards innovative cropping systems.Développer une agriculture plus écologique », injonction prégnante des politiques territoriales actuelles, invite à s’interroger sur les conditions d’apprentissage des agriculteurs en situation de travail. Notre méthodologie, à l’interface entre didactique professionnelle et agronomie, s’appuie sur des entretiens auprès de vingt céréaliers français, qui ont réduit l’usage des pesticides et engrais au cours de leur carrière professionnelle. Pour analyser la configuration de conditions d’apprentissage accompagnant chaque changement de pratiques vers la réduction d’intrants, nous avons conçu un cadre d’analyse distinguant trois phases successives (la mise en alerte, l’expérience, et l’évaluation), en nous inspirant de la théorie de l’enquête de Dewey (1993). Chaque phase du processus d’apprentissage a été caractérisée par un ensemble de variables elles-mêmes déclinées en un ensemble de modalités. Une classification ascendante hiérarchique a permis d’identifier dix types de configurations de conditions d’apprentissage. Chaque agriculteur mobilise, au fil de sa carrière, plusieurs configurations-types combinant des formes d’expérience et des personnes ressources variées. Si en tendance les agriculteurs ont modifié leurs pratiques dans la proximité avec autrui, certaines configurations-types se déroulent en autonomie complète (20 % des cas) ce qui révèle à la fois un isolement de certains agriculteurs, et une capacité d’autres agriculteurs à combiner apprentissages en groupe et apprentissages en autonomie. L’identification que nous avons faite de configurations de conditions d’apprentissage constitue une approche originale pour traiter des apprentissages en situation de travail et offre des outils pour structurer un travail d’accompagnement des agriculteurs vers des systèmes de culture innovants

Simulation of consumer exposure to deoxynivalenol according to wheat crop management and grain segregation: Case studies and methodological considerations

International audienceWe combined agronomic data and a model simulating exposure based on consumption data to assess the impact of crop management and grain segregation procedures on consumer exposure to deoxynivalenol. We used three scenarios of soil tillage at a regional scale and three scenarios of grain segregation for a supply area. The soil tillage scenarios were applied to a range of mean crop contamination levels, with various coefficients representing the degree of tillage. The grain segregation scenarios were applied to two real datasets of DON content distributions. We found that the increase in consumer exposure in response to increases in "risky" crop management practices such as direct-drilling depends largely on mean contamination and on the value of the tillage coefficient. The results for grain segregation procedures showed that exposure was most strongly affected by contamination distributions as the segregation procedure minimising risk differed for the two datasets

Socio-technical lock-in hinders crop diversification in France

International audienceCrop diversification is considered as a major lever to increase the sustainability of arable farming systems, allowing reduced inputs (irrigation water, pesticides, fertilizers), increasing the heterogeneity of habitat mosaics, or reducing yield gap associated with too frequent returns of the same species. To free up paths of collective action, this article highlights obstacles to crop diversification, existing at various levels of the value chains. We used a threefold approach: (i) a cross-cutting analysis of impediments to the development of 11 diversifying crops (5 species of grain legumes, alfalfa, flax, hemp, linseed, mustard, sorghum), based on published documents and on 30 interviews of stakeholders in French value chains; (ii) a detailed study (55 semi-structured surveys, including 39 farmers) of three value chains: pea and linseed for animal feed, hemp for insulation and biomaterials; and (iii) a bibliometric analysis of the technical journals and websites (180 articles) to characterize the nature of information diffused to farmers. We highlight that the development of minor crops is hindered by a socio-technical lock-in in favor of the dominant species (wheat, rapeseed, maize, etc.). We show for the first time that this lock-in is characterized by strongly interconnected impediments, occurring at every link of the value chains, such as lack of availability of improved varieties and methods of plant protection, scarcity of quantified references on crop successions, complexity of the knowledge to be acquired by farmers, logistical constraints to harvest collection, and difficulties of coordination within the emerging value chains. On the basis of this lock-in analysis, that could concern other European countries, the article proposes levers aimed at encouraging actors to incorporate a greater diversity of crops into their productive systems: adaptation of standards and labelling, better coordination between stakeholders to fairly share added value within value chains, and combination of genetic, agronomic, technological, and organizational innovations

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe