Farmers’ limited perceptions of the role of ecological processes in crop production, a potential obstacle to agroecological transition

Industrialized agriculture has strong impacts on ecosystem functioning. However, despite public policies, incentives and scientific warnings, intensive agriculture remains the main model. Agroecology, as a way to produce food while relying on ecological processes and reducing negative externalities, is considered as a sustainable alternative. The literature on agroecological transitions increasingly focuses on the perceptions that farmers have of ecological processes, supposing that the more farmers perceive the interests of ecological processes for production, the more they will implement sustainable farming practices. In this research, we tested the hypothesis that an obstacle to an agroecological transition is that farmers have little awareness of the reliance of food production on the natural functions of ecosystems. We thus address three issues in this article: first, the weight farmers gave to ecological processes in farming production itself; second, the roles of on-farm experiments (OFEs) or agri-environmental schemes (AESs) as drivers of this perception of ecological processes; and third, the links between the perception of ecological processes and the definitions of agroecology given by farmers. We interviewed 78 farmers representative of an intensive cereal plain in western France about what they perceive as drivers of crop production and of soil fertility and the links they perceived between hedges and crop production. Our results show that farmers perceive climate, inputs and technical aspects of crop production as more important drivers of crop yields than ecological processes. By contrast in non-productive areas of the farm, the perception of the importance of ecological processes was greater for questions relating to hedges. A redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that AESs rather than OFEs positively affected farmers' perceptions of ecological processes in sustaining farming. Nevertheless, despite the fact that half of the farmers related agroecology to benefits in ecosystem functioning, they had limited perceptions of the positive role of ecological processes in sustaining farming. Our study therefore supports our hypothesis that limited perceptions of the role of ecosystem functions in farming could be an obstacle to an agroecological transition, as agroecology and ecological processes are seen as beneficial for ecosystems but not for farming production. Our study also suggests that open-ended and indirect questions rather than direct methodologies can bring new insights to our understanding of farmers’ perceptions.