Patterns of work organisation in livestock farms: the ATELAGE model | Formes d'organisation du travail dans les exploitations d'élevage: le modèle Atelage

[Departement_IRSTEA]Territoires [TR1_IRSTEA]DTAM

International audience

anglais. Work in livestock farms often appears to stand in the way of technical innovations. However, in farming system modelling, farmers are portrayed as managers but not as work organisers or workers. Expectations in terms of liveability are increasingly expressed by farmers within a context of society and market pressures and deep changes in farming itself (size of farms, workforce, off-farm activities, etc.), meaning that working conditions and the effectiveness of work organisation are critical issues today. Very few disciplinary conceptual frameworks or methodologies contribute to producing knowledge on work organisation in livestock farms, taking production processes into account. In this document, we present a model called ATELAGE. It is based on livestock farming systems and ergonomic concepts and approaches. It aims at representing and qualifying work organisation in livestock farms and, more precisely, the solutions adopted by livestock farmers to manage livestock production processes, workforce and non-agricultural activities including breaks and holidays, throughout a yearly production cycle. Work organisation is described at the scales of both time periods within the year and the whole agricultural year by forms of daily organisation. Criteria are proposed to qualify variations in work organisation, and labour division in particular. We then apply the model to ten livestock farms and, using a hierarchical clustering, we identify three patterns of work organisation that take account of farm diversity. This approach allows us to better understand organisational patterns, the farmers' situations and their practices. Modelling thus contributes to the debate on assessments of the way a system operates and to the design of new systems that incorporate work organisation as a dimension.