New stakes of field work logistics for annual crops in French conditions. II. The spatial organization of crops: examples and questions.

摘要

Using data from a survey of 30 crop farms in the east of France, four strategies to minimize transport times have been identified: (i) cultivating the same crop on a set of distant fields; (ii) grouping the crops by sets of relatively close fields; (iii) organizing one or more field operations starting at one end of the farm (or group of farms working together) and finishing at the other end; and (iv) setting up an organization between associated farmers whereby each one works the fields close to his own place. Several of these strategies can be combined on the same farm or in a given association. These observations bring about a number of questions: (i) to agronomists who should study and model working schemes and transportation organization as well as crop growing operations, bearing in mind the fact that various time scales (hourly, annual, multiannual) are overlapping in the organization of the farms (crop rotations, working schemes); (ii) to sociologists who should focus on the operational conditions and procedures of the new forms of farmers' associations; and (iii) to developers and policy-makers who should, for example, investigate the possibility of establishing new land consolidation procedures..