Design of equipment for agroecology: Coupled innovation processes led by farmer-designers

Highlights

• We studied features of equipment design processes for agroecology.

• Equipment designed shares two properties: appropriateness and adaptability.

• Equipment and cropping systems emerge from coupled innovation design processes.

• Design processes involves multiple designers: farmers and R&D actors.

• The R&D actors take on three roles to foster the on-farm equipment design.

Abstract

More and more questions are currently being raised as to what the farm equipment of the future ought to be and how it should be designed to best meet contemporary challenges in farming. In Western countries, innovation in agricultural equipment is focused on a dominant model in which the agro-industry designs and patents standardised equipment for farmers. However, today's ambitions for agriculture, with agroecology in the lead, require us to devise farming systems that are adaptable to social and ecological uncertainties, and to recognise and embrace the diversity of situations in which farming is practiced. There has until now been little research on equipment design processes consistent with these principles, and this research helps to fill this gap. To address this issue, we studied the French “Atelier Paysan” R&D organisation, created to support on-farm design of suitable equipment for agroecology. Based on design theories, we analysed three aspects of Atelier Paysan's design activities: specific properties of the equipment designed under its aegis; specific features of the design processes; and roles that Atelier Paysan takes on to enable the design of this equipment. Our results show that all the equipment designed was appropriate for the designers' situations and requirements, and adaptable to other situations. It emerged from design processes in which the farmers had the support of R&D to design both their own equipment and the cropping systems for which it would be used. We call this the design of coupled innovations, and show that farm equipment and cropping systems are designed together during experiments. Lastly, we show that the Atelier Paysan R&D organisation supports these design processes in three ways: it enables farmers to share their experiences of on-farm design; it makes available a set of resources to stimulate farmer-driven design of new equipment; and it brings together designers scattered all over France around a shared ambition for agriculture. This work opens up avenues for research: (i) to explore an alternative to the dominant design, which would rely on coupled innovation design processes and allow for the emergence of appropriate and adaptable equipment that complies with agroecological principles; and (ii) to explore ways of organising open-innovation processes for agroecology, by supporting farmer-designers, and thus rethinking the roles of ‘users’ in these processes.

Introduction

Advances in agricultural equipment have always played a major role in the evolution of agriculture (e.g. Sigaut, 1989). Questions are increasingly being raised today as to what the farm equipment of the future ought to be, and how it should be designed to best meet contemporary challenges in agriculture (Pisante et al., 2012; Sims and Kienzle, 2015; Bellon Maurel and Huyghe, 2017; Kirui and von Braun, 2018). In Western countries, innovation in agricultural equipment currently focuses on a dominant design (e.g. FAO, 2013; Guillou et al., 2013; Bournigal, 2014), which very largely fits what Mazoyer and Roudart (2006) call the “motorised mechanisation” of agriculture that emerged in the mid-20th century. This has evolved into equipment incorporating digital technology, as attested by the frequent references in the literature to such concepts as “smart farming” (e.g. Wolfert et al., 2017; Relf-Eckstein et al., 2019), “agriculture 4.0” (e.g. Huh and Kim, 2018), “digital agriculture” or “agricultural robotics” (e.g. Ramin Shamshiri et al., 2018), and stated priorities in government support for agricultural innovation (e.g. the Agriculture-Innovation 2025 en France report includes “digital agriculture” and “robotic agriculture” as priorities). The challenges for designers of this equipment are to increase “reliability, efficiency and precision” (Bournigal, 2014) and to optimise farmers' actions by cutting input wastage, reducing occupational hazards and making equipment more ergonomic. Some authors write about equipment that fosters farmers' “autonomy”, by which they mean cutting working hours or reconfiguring crop management tasks, which are partly taken over by computerised systems. One emblematic example is precision farming, in which fertiliser or pesticide applications are optimally managed in the field with the aid of spatialised data provided by onboard sensors on the equipment (Lindblom et al., 2016).

Today, most farm equipment is designed by manufacturers that market patented equipment (Fourati-Jamoussi, 2018) built from new materials and intended for large-scale, often international markets. The equipment designed is standardised (Piovan, 2018) for use in the most typical farming systems of the market: farms using chemical inputs on large fields (Onwude et al., 2016). For these firms, the main drivers of innovation are “customer demand and differentiation from competitors, (...) cutting production costs and complying with environmental standards and regulations” (Bournigal, 2014). From this standpoint, “innovative” is defined by the agro-industry and helps to rejuvenate the market offering.

In most European countries, this entrepreneurial drive in the private sector is accompanied by public sector withdrawal from research (Guillou et al., 2013), and the few scientific studies on the subject mainly concern improving sensors and onboard digital tools for precision agriculture (Bournigal, 2014). Meanwhile in the agronomy literature, articles on support for the design of agricultural systems (e.g. Rapidel et al., 2009; Ronner et al., 2019) regard equipment as a contingent variable and not as objects to be designed – that is, if they mention it at all. This situation reflects the compartmentalisation of research described by Piovan (2018), with research on farm equipment separate from agronomy research.

By contrast, today's ambitions for agriculture, with agroecology in the lead, introduce new challenges such as: recognising the diversity of farmer's situations and expectations (Altieri, 2002); considering uncertainty associated with poorly known agroecological systems (Brugnach et al., 2008); or also developing system approaches and fostering the open-sharing of knowledge, ideas and know-how while re-designing farming systems (Meynard et al., 2012). These issues highlight limitations of the dominant design: how can standardised farm equipment meet the needs and expectations of farmers working in diverse agricultural situations (Nicholls and Altieri, 2018)? How can equipment designed off-farm be made to fit technical systems designed in situ, and cope with the social, ecological or economic uncertainties inherent to eco-friendly systems (Brugnach et al., 2008)? Do patents and digital tools not obstruct the ability of farmers to repair and transform their equipment (Van der Ploeg, 2008)?

Several studies have highlighted alternative processes for farm equipment design. The processes described are always more open, and suggest the need to review the roles of the parties involved. Bellon Maurel and Huyghe (2017), for example, stress the importance of involving the farmer-users at the start of the design process, to enable them to express their needs, and to make it more likely that the design will find a use. Lucas and Gasselin (2016) show that, in the networks of farmers linked to cooperatives for the use of agricultural equipment (CUMA, in France), the sharing of equipment increases the ability to adapt practices in an uncertain environment, and to engage in new and/or diverse practices on a farm by reducing individual investment costs and risks (Lucas et al., 2018). In these situations, the equipment already exists and farmers share its use.

Some articles mention other challenges: “How can farm equipment that does not yet exist be designed for agricultural systems that do not yet exist either?” (Bournigal, 2014), or “Another major obstacle is to be found in the lack of interaction between farm machinery designers, on the one hand, and designers of new cultivation and breeding systems, on the other: a joint working between them is urgently needed.” (Bellon Maurel and Huyghe, 2017), or yet “farm equipment can be thought of as resources that do more than just respond to demand, because they foster the establishment of agroecology” (Piovan, 2018).

Our study is in line with this research trend and aims to contribute to a theorisation of the processes of designing equipment for agroecology. More precisely, the intention is to shed light on features of equipment design processes that are consistent with agroecological principles. With this aim, we use a case study approach, and in so doing we harness theoretical inputs from design sciences and agronomy.

We first present the conceptual framework we have adopted (2), then detail the research method we used (3), present our findings (4), and close with a discussion of the main results (5).