New stakes of field work logistics for annual crops in French conditions. II. The spatial organization of crops: Examples and questions | Nouveaux enjeux de la logistique dans les exploitations de grande culture. L’organisation spatiale des assolements : exemples et questions

National audience

anglais. Using data from surveys on thirty farms in the East of France, four logics aiming at minimizing transport times have been identified, as follows: i) to cultivate the same crop on a set of distant fields; ii) to group the crops by sets of relatively close fields; (iii) to organize 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) to set up an organization between associated farmers whereby each one works the fields close to his own place. Several logics 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 on the possibility of establishing new land consolidation procedures.

français. Nous présentons des exemples concrets des implications que les problèmes de déplacements et de transports peuvent avoir sur l’organisation spatiale des assolements dans les systèmes de grande culture. Puis nous évoquons quelques-uns des problèmes que cela pose : i) aux agronomes, en mettant par exemple en évidence l’imbrication de différentes échelles de temps (horaire, annuelle, pluriannuelle) dans l’organisation de l’exploitation (chantiers de travail, assolement...) ; ii) aux sociologues, sur les conditions et modalités de fonctionnement des nouvelles formes d’association entre agriculteurs ; iii) aux aménageurs et aux politiques.