Why and how design monitoring processes of farmer practices at local/regional level? Agronomists endorsing Community Information Systems on farmer practices

摘要

Sixty years after its launching through the "Marshall Plan", the European agriculture revolution is up again, but with some strong contradictions: water pollution, biodiversity erosion, landscape uniformization, ethical crisis (Fresco, 2000). These harmful side-effects of agriculture could be aggravated if the evolution of agricultural practices continues following the current trends towards greater concentration, intensification and technicality. We focus our communication on agricultural practices,from their choice by farmers decisions to their effects, as they continuously remodel our agricultural landscapes. The approach of farming systems as landscape "builders" is a new one, but its background is the vision of land as resource for agriculture(de Wit, 1992; Lardon et al, 1990), These farmer practices changes appear to be strongly linked to all the severe environmental questions in Europe (Benoft et al, 2005). But there is a large lack of data and information systems helping stakeholders in their negociations. The object of this paper is to propose a research procedure of farmer practices monitoring at local/regional scale and to illustrate it for some european situations: Munich watershed protection, the Seine basin, four specific regionalzones in France. We name Community Information Systems on Agricultural Practices (CISAP), those monitoring processes.