Challenges of complying with both food value chain specifications and agroecology principles in vegetable crop protection
Introduction
To meet the challenges of sustainability in agricultural system design, reducing the dependency on synthetic plant protection products (PPPs) has become a core issue. Synthetic PPPs are the cause of multiple environmental and human health disturbances (Geiger et al., 2010; Mostafalou and Abdollahi, 2013; Carvalho, 2017). Two major triggers prompt farmers to reduce their use: public policies, and food chains. In France, the national “plan Ecophyto” policy (LégiFrance, 2014), in line with the European Commission policy (EC, 2009), promotes an agroecological approach to reduce synthetic PPP use and its side effects. Public policies also support the use of bio-based PPPs (or “biopesticides”) with fewer unintentional effects (Villaverde et al., 2014), and of organic farming, where the use of synthetic PPPs is forbidden (EC, 2008). Another trigger to reduce synthetic PPPs in conventional systems comes from downstream actors who apply extralegal requirements for PPP-free products. These requirements strongly limit market access for conventional agricultural products, especially fruit and vegetables (Codron et al., 2005).
Agroecological crop protection (ACP) has been defined over the past decade, based on the development of agroecology interdisciplinary science and practices (Altieri, 2002; Altieri and Nicholls, 2004; Wezel et al., 2014) and extended principles of integrated pest management (Deguine et al., 2009, Deguine et al., 2017; Ratnadass and Barzman, 2014). This promising approach focused on overall crop health has so far been implemented mainly in tropical and arid areas (Deguine et al., 2015, Deguine et al., 2018; Simon et al., 2017; Brévault and Clouvel, 2019). Two main success drivers for ACP strategies are the combination of levers at multiple scales, and wide spatiotemporal plant diversity (Malézieux et al., 2009; Malézieux, 2012; Ratnadass et al., 2012). ACP thus requires a holistic approach to agroecosystem design and crop management, that takes into account all the aerial and soil-borne pests and pathogens of all the crops of the crop sequence.
Vegetable crops are minor crops facing two major challenges: producing high-quality products for commercial and health reasons, and controlling pest pressure on gross and marketable yields (Lamichhane et al., 2015). The challenge is huge as there are many soil-borne and aerial diseases and pests that affect vegetable crops (Galicher et al., 2017; Lamichhane et al., 2017).
Agrocological systems must be adapted to official regulations and to environmental parameters that impact farm management. But they must also comply with the specifications of the food value chains (FVC) targeted (Hatt et al., 2016). The FAO (2014) definition of fresh vegetable FVCs encompasses the farm producing such raw materials as well as the connected firms involved in collecting, retailing and marketing them according to specifications, from production to consumption. FVCs thus often frame the expected production (Meynard et al., 2017), fixing prices and defining types and assortment of products, volumes, and marketing standards. These specifications determine farm and crop management as regards the production calendar, time allocation to production vs. selling, allowed or excluded inputs, crop protection intensity, and so on. Agroecological crop protection therefore has to be consistent with both farm management and food value chain specifications. This is particularly significant for fresh vegetables, which are highly perishable goods, making the definition of marketing standards tricky and logistics essential (Saucède, 2010). As a result, marketing standards for cosmetic issues are very strict in long FVCs, where the quality is liable to deteriorate along the multiple steps of the logistic chain. By contrast, in short supply chains and in particular in direct selling, the marketing requirements are less standardized, with less stringent cosmetic criteria but stricter taste criteria, which can lead to changes in crop management (Bressoud, 2010). The necessity to provide an assortment of products fitting consumer requirements in direct selling usually goes hand-in-hand with the agroecological principle of crop diversification (Navarrete, 2009; Aubry et al., 2011). But it makes the farm management more complex and increases workloads (Navarrete et al., 2015). As an adjustment strategy, some farmers simplify crop management regarding, for instance, crop nutrition or crop protection (Aubry et al., 2011).
Therefore, developing and implementing agroecological crop protection strategies that are efficient in the short and long term can be challenged by FVC specifications. A wide range of crops can be produced in low-tech sheltered systems which can be colonized by many pests and diseases that threaten their profitability. In these systems, short-term crop protection management is particularly challenging. Yet, more so than for other crops, it is unrealistic here to wish to fully anticipate exhaustive sets of decision rules, given the inherent complexity of diversified vegetables systems and the wide range of practices to implement respecting different sensitive natural mechanisms, while keeping up with the FVC expectation. We assume that the concrete implementation of ACP consists in articulating planning strategies and responsiveness to unpredictable events (Robert et al., 2016), depending not only on the environmental context but also farm management and FVC specifications.
In this article, we explore diverse vegetable cropping systems where agroecological crop protection principles were put to the test at field scale. We report on the challenges of complying with both FVC specifications and agroecology principles in protected vegetable crop protection. We studied four different ACP strategies under experimentation for 4.5 years considering the whole range of pests and diseases and their impact at short and mid-term on all the successive crops. Section 2 of the article presents the experimental conditions as well as the method used to characterize these strategies and assess the compatibility between agroecological principles and FVC. Section 3 presents the results of this assessment. In Section 4, from our experiment, we discuss and define routes for meeting the challenge of applying agroecological crop protection while meeting FVC specifications in protected vegetable systems.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Over a period of 4.5 years, we designed, implemented and characterized four protected vegetable cropping systems, each of which had a specific agroecological crop protection strategy and was designed for a particular food value chain. We represented four emblematic and contrasting FVCs of fresh, largely unpackaged vegetables: “local direct sale in low-pesticide farming” (DS-LP), “local direct sale in organic farming” (DS-O), “super- and hypermarket value chain in low-pesticide farming” (SM-LP)
Results
We present the outcomes of the 4 ACP strategies implemented by detailing first the results in the two SM systems (3.1) and then by comparison those of the DS systems (3.2). For each, the result is described in three steps: characterization of and reasons for the ACP strategies; performances for controlling aerial pests and diseases; and compliance with FVC specifications.
Discussion
We now discuss the results of these four cases experimented through some success or failure factors in the implementation of ACP principles in compliance with FVC specifications. We then propose options to be further explored to stimulate the on-farm emergence of agroecological vegetable production systems.
Conclusion
In this article we have presented the outcomes of four experimented protected vegetable cropping systems. We built an original and operating framework to design and assess multi-objectives cropping systems. We used an innovative systemic presentation of agroecological strategies designed in action as close as possible to the technical and economic realities. We have illustrated that agroecological crop protection can be compatible with the FVC's expectations in some cases but with several
Compliance with ethical standards and funding information
This research was part of the 4SYSLEG project (2012–2018) and was carried out with the financial support of the Agence Française pour la Biodiversité (call for projects: “Ecophyto Dephy EXPE”).
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to heartily thank the technical team of the INRAE experimental station of Alénya for the design, experiments and data collection, season after season. The authors also thank M. J.M. Meynard for his important support to the 4SYSLEG project, in particular for rich discussions on the way to adapt system experiment methods on the specificities of protected market-gardening. The authors thank Liz Carey Libbrecht for language editing the English version of this paper.
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