Organic agriculture development for landscape greening – DynRurABio

This project aims at developing organic food and farming (OF&F), following the national and European goals. The French long-term development plan (PPDAB) «Agriculture et alimentation biologiques - Horizon 2012» aims in particular to triple the mean area devoted to organic agriculture within 5 years (up to 20% in 2020). The extension of Organic agriculture is required both to increase the supply in certified product on French market, but also to participate to the ecologisation of agriculture. And yet, one key problem of organic agriculture is its low productivity and the great variability in yields, leading to incertainty for farmers, but also supply chain managers and public organisation in charge of preservation of environmental resources. Intensifying organic agriculture may be therefore a way of development. But the concrete modalities and consequences of such intensification have to be analysed.

The global goal of the DynRurABio project is to develop and perpetuate an intensive but ecological organic agriculture to live up to market and politicians’s expectations, but also to increase ecological services and participate in ecologising territories. It is a multidisciplinary consortium of scientists (agricultural science, ecology, economy, sociology) and professional organisations with expertise on OF&F. The aim is to adapt and produce knowledge, tools and also organisations capable to increase organic farming on French territories. There is a huge stake to increase productivity of such an agriculture traditionally based on using and recycling its own resources and on autonomy, without reducing its ecological performances. The project non only aims at improving the scientific knowledge, but also at identifying how to encourage the emergence and development of these new intensive production patterns. This raises several questions on the transitions from conventional or extensive organic systems to intensive new ones, and how all these various systems may combine within local the territories and at supply chain levels.

The project consists in comparing several studies combining various production systems and geographical areas, both in animal and crop production. It enables to analyse scientific issues on systems where the scientists involved in the project already have a lot of information, but also to compare systems with various levels of intensification (from livestock grazing on rangeland to intensive market-gardening and fruit orchard). This organised comparison between several studies will enable to produce more generic knowledge.
The expected results will contribute to:
- Improving productivity in OF&F by increasing our knowledge on intensification processes,
- Ensuring a good quality in organic products by analysing the relationships between quality and intensive management,
- Insuring ecological services in OF&F by determining how these services are altered when practices are more intensive.
- Enabling an increase in areas devoted to OF&F by studying the possible transitions between various systems, identifying the key determinants and how they can co-exist with conventional systems,
- Proposing territorial patterns for OF&F by analysing how present local systems may move to intensive ones, but also what are the consequences of the development of such intensive systems on territories and supply chains.