Fleur Marchand

• Prof. Dr. ir.
• Scientific Director - Social Science Unit at Instituut voor Landbouw en Visserijonderzoek

CONTEXT Sustainability transitions in agri-food systems are expected to reduce their negative environmental and social impacts. On the other hand, Europe demands an increase in the agricultural land under organic farming by 2030. Innovations in agri-food systems, especially in the organic sector, could close the gap in sustainability transitions an...

This methodological brief offers comprehensive guidance on how to study the core objectives (the what) of the ENFASYS project, which focuses on facilitating transitions to resilient and sustainable agricultural systems. Purpose: The brief addresses the central question: How can ENFASYS support societal actors in understanding and addressing lock...

The expectation that agricultural advisors will facilitate Interactive Innovation is accompanied by novel expectations for their competency profile. In addition to their traditional technical basis, advisors are now expected to organise multi-actor processes, facilitate learning, mediate conflict, etc. Innovation support services are inherently div...

In this paper we reflect on the effectiveness of cognitive mapping (CMing) as a method to study farm functioning in its complexity and its diverse forms in the framework of our own experiment with a diverse group of Flemish beef farmers. With a structured direct elicitation method we gathered 30 CMs. We analyzed the content of these maps both quali...

Purpose We defined a methodological framework to monitor and evaluate farmer’s knowledge exchange and learning processes. Our proposed methodology can help farm advisors during the set-up, facilitation and evaluation of interactive activities with farmers, enabling the learning environment for adopting agroecological measures. Approach We used a m...

Purpose It remains a critical question how to support farmers to develop towards more sustainable practices. Earlier experiences reveal that on-farm demonstrations (OFDs) can be part of the answer. Therefore, we investigate OFDs as potential transformative learning spaces. Methodology We apply a mixed methods approach, using an observation tool, p...

Purpose The paper focuses on exploring the influence of structural and functional characteristics of demonstrations on their effectiveness. Design/Methodology In the framework of AgriDemo-F2F project, we analysed the responses to 345 post-demonstration questionnaires filled out by the attendees of 31 demo events held in 12 EU countries. Factor ana...

Purpose The objective of this paper is to undertake an in-depth exploration of how structural characteristics of on-farm demonstration events impact the effectiveness of the demonstration as perceived by participants. Methodology An explanatory mixed-methods approach was used based on the responses to 356 post-demonstration questionnaires filled o...

Purpose The paper aims to examine interactions between demonstrations at programme level and Agricultural Advisory Services (AAS). It situates analysis of the demonstration programme activities within contemporary advisory contexts, asking: how do demonstration programmes interact with the AAS in which they are situated; and what role do demonstrat...

Context Resilience represents the ability of systems to anticipate, withstand, or adapt to challenges. Times of great stress and disturbance offer opportunity to identify and confirm key contributors to agri-food system resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic and its related consequences constituted major shock, challenging the resilience of many agri-fo...

Agroecology is increasingly recognized as a valuable perspective to face the sustainability challenges of contemporary foods systems. Yet case-comparisons based on a holistic assessment of actual farmer practices have been lacking. In this paper, we seek to identify the different farming models underlying the sets of practices of Flemish beef farme...

During farming demonstrations, peer-to-peer learning is known to be more effective than technology transfer when encouraging farmers to consider adopting more sustainable farming practices. Interactive knowledge creation has the potential to create a stimulating peer-learning environment focusing on the use of hands-on activities, knowledge scaffol...

A wide variety of public and private initiatives aim to support on-farm sustainable development. But these sustainable farming initiatives (SFIs) show considerable variation in their success to do so. To understand success factors and propose appropriate strategies for continuing and expanding SFI’s, we scrutinized the developmental history of Veld...

A multitude of farm-level sustainability assessment tools (SATs) exists, reflecting a variety of agricultural practices and sustainability perceptions. Tools differ and insight is lacking about how they match with farmers’ needs. This paper examines whether and how existing SATs focus on the farmer’s strategic decision-making. The potential of the...

Tactile spaces as learning environments influence individuals’ attitudes through social embeddedness or interconnections among people, and physical embodiedness through experiencing surroundings, potentially fostering deep commitments. When on-farm demonstrations operate as tactile spaces, they could potentially support the adoption of innovative a...

In the face of longstanding social and technological trends, the application of agroecological insights at beef farms in Flanders may at first seem a curious proposition. We found, however, that beef farmers pursue agroecological principles through an impressive diversity of practices in this context. In 37 semi-structured interviews, we asked farm...

Over the past two years, two projects - AgriDemo-F2F and PLAID (H2020) - have investigated peer learning in the context of on-farm demonstrations across Europe. Both projects will produce their results in the coming months. Early 2018, NEFERTITI (H2020) started with the objective to boost peer learning through the development of 10 supra-regional n...

During the last several decades, inter-organizational collaboration in the food sector has emerged to tackle complex problems such as sustainability. However, in practice, these networks often either fall short of their goal or disband. Therefore, we investigate the role of culture within these networks to gain insights into the transformative capa...

Peer-to-peer approaches seem promising in enhancing sustainable agricultural systems. However, the kind of learning processes that underlie peer learning approaches have not been sufficiently studied in farmer-to-farmer settings. To answer the question how peer learning processes can foster farmer learning for sustainable agriculture, we will devel...

Demonstration farms have a long tradition and have proved to be an effective means of supporting farmers in problem solving at the farm level. The new demands of complex and uncertain agricultural systems call for a renewed understanding of the approaches used and the concepts that underpin them, in particular those relating to farmer learning in t...

Demonstration farms have a long tradition and have proved to be an effective means of supporting farmers in problem solving at the farm level. The new demands of complex and uncertain agricultural systems call for a renewed understanding of the approaches used and the concepts that underpin them, in particular those relating to farmer learning in t...

Non-inversion tillage (NIT) is often recommended as a soil conservation measure, protecting soil structure and soil life and preventing erosion. As the adoption of this measure is still below policy targets in many European regions, this study aimed at gaining insights in constraints and drivers of implementing NIT to understand how to stimulate be...

Actors in the agri-food system are increasingly urged to more sustainability, but actions to organize the system's sustainable development encounter difficulties, such as overcoming trust between actors, aligning different views on sustainability or finding the right tools to monitor sustainable development. This suggests that more guidance is need...

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a promising concept for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation in sustainable agricultural development, but empirical evidence from the farmers’ viewpoint is scarce. This paper contributes to empirical insights on the knowledge creation in CoPs as valued by farmers. Using concepts from CoP theory (domain, communi...

Demonstration farms have a long tradition and have proved to be effective means of addressing problems and testing solutions at the farm level. However, demonstrations are operating in an increasingly complex and diverse arena of new policy and commercial imperatives, volatile costs and markets, changing farm structure, new technological and ICT ad...

In recent sustainability assessments, transdisciplinary approaches have been used to bridge contested normative views among many societal actors, policymakers and researchers. Transdisciplinary research is mainly based on three premises: (1) various perspectives need to be incorporated and discussed to empower actors, (2) the collaboration and co-c...

European agriculture is a large importer of nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers. Additionally, countries with livestock-intensive farming face problems with disposal of nutrients in animal manure. The availability of chemical fertilizers has changed farmers' past dependence on manure. Nowadays, despite its nutrient content, manure is some...

Many tools to analyse and support sustainable development exist, but their use in the agricultural sector remains obstructed by the sector’s complexity and diversity. The objective of this research was to analyse, with a participatory action-research approach, various aspects of the design and use of sustainability assessment tools. The research or...

Sustainable farming initiatives (SFIs), which aim to support farmers’ adoption of sustainable practices vary in the degree of farmer participation. In this study, we explored the influence of SFI design characteristics on farmer motivation to participate. Based on self-determination theory, we framed farmer participation by linking participants’ mo...

ABSTRACT The shift to industrial agriculture in Europe brought along a range of environmental and social externalities. This led policy makers, researchers and civil servants to consider and explore the potential of diversified farming systems (DFS) to address current problems in agriculture. However, because of multiple obstacles adoption of these...

Sustainable crop protection (SCP) has many facets. Farmers may therefore perceive transition to SCP as very complex. The Dual Indicator Set for Crop Protection Sustainability (DISCUSS) can handle this complexity. To provide targeted support throughout the transition to SCP, complexity capture must be synchronised with the time course of on-farm dec...

Sustainability indicators are well recognized for their potential to assess and monitor sustainable development of agricultural systems. A large number of indicators are proposed in various sustainability assessment frameworks, which raises concerns regarding the validity of approaches, usefulness and trust in such frameworks. Selecting indicators...

Agroecological agriculture strives for an overall decreased dependency on external resources, by following a systemic approach where ecological and socioeconomic aspects of a farm are considered strongly interconnected. As such, it is increasingly recognized as an alternative for more conventional farming systems. However, such an approach also req...

In recent years, research, society and industry recognize the need to transform the agri-food system towards sustainability. Within this process, sustainability experiments play a crucial role in transforming the structure, culture and practices. In literature, much attention is given to new business models, even if the transformation of convention...

The agri-food system is increasingly under pressure due to external and internal changes, urging the agri-food chain to transform towards sustainability. Since sustainability is a normative concept, different visions on the way to follow exist. Therefore, the identification of shared transformation pathways based on both factual knowledge and stake...

Responding to future challenges and societal needs, various actions are taken in agriculture to evolve towards more sustainable farming practices. These actions imply strategic choices and suppose adequate sustainability assessments to identify, measure, evaluate and communicate sustainable development. However, literature is scarce on the link bet...

A myriad of sustainability assessment (SA) frameworks, metrics and tools have been developed. As the TempAg network aims to deliver resilient agricultural production systems, a.o. by comparing their sustainability performance, the first step was to identify currently used SAs and discern their characteristics. Therefore, from an SA inventory, integ...

Knowledge is being recognized as a crucial resource in the search for more sustainable farming practices. We present a literature review, discussing i) the types of knowledge at stake, ii) by who and how it can be created or acquired optimally, and the different associated learning processes and iii) on the role of networks and communities in suppo...

Adoption of sustainability assessment tools in agricultural practice is often disappointing. One of the critical success factors for adoption is the tool development process. Because scientific attention to these development processes and insights about them are rather limited, we aimed to foster the scientific debate on this topic. This was done b...

Although the literature on sustainability assessment tools to support decision making in agriculture is rapidly growing, little attention has been paid to the actual tool choice. We focused on the choice of more complex integrated indicator-based tools at the farm level. The objective was to determine key characteristics as criteria for tool choice...

To respond to the challenges of sustainable farm development it is no longer sufficient for farmers to be a craftsman. Entrepreneurial and management skills are becoming an important requisite. Farmers are thus forced to learn and further professionalize in the field of entrepreneurship. The research aims to operationalize the complex multidimensio...

DISCUSS, the Dual Indicator Set for Sustainable Crop protection Sustainability Surveys, was designed to help farmers achieve more sustainable crop protection. The indicator set pairs risk indicators POCER , with response indicators a management questionnaire. Both parts of DISCUSS are indicators in their own right, but the dual risk-response setup...

A participatory - expert-driven – approach was used to create DISCUSS, a dual indicator set that pairs a pesticide risk assessment system with a farm inquiry. DISCUSS was designed for implementation in farmers’ discussion groups, coached by an advisor. Before taking it from the design table into practice though, some additional conditions need to b...

Farmers are being called to use plant protection products (PPPs) more consciously and adopt more sustainable crop protection strategies. Indicators will help farmers to monitor their progress towards sustainability and will support their learning process. Talking the indicators through in farmers' discussion groups and the resulting peer encouragem...

We performed an integrated evaluation of the sustainability performance of 10 intensive grazing and 10 zero-grazing specialised Flemish dairy farms, using a selection of sustainability indicators from MOTIFS(Monitoring Tool for Integrated Farm Sustainability). We put special effort in formulating useful management advice for farmers of both groups....

Belgian fruit growers are faced with a growing need for sustainable development. Therefore, it is important to integrate sustainability in their business management processes. This research applies and evaluates a self-analysis tool for entrepreneurs, called the ‘sustainability scan’ on 11 fruit producing holdings in Belgium. This scan distingu...

Integrated sustainability assessment (ISA) models can trigger change towards sustainable agriculture. This paper reports the implementation of an existing ISA model in Flanders, MOTIFS (Monitoring Tool for Integrated Farm Sustainability), in two cases in dairy farming selected from private/public accountancy/consultancy networks. Interactive learni...

Current Flemish (and European) policy makers encourage the sustainable development of farming, in which a balance between People, Planet and Profit is required. As craftsmanship alone will no longer be enough to integrate these divergent aspects, farmers need to develop entrepreneurial and managerial skills. For this reason, complementary to the ec...

When striving to make farming more sustainable, farmers need to acquire new skills and competencies in order to stay competitive while producing in a sustainable way. Trial and error learning by the individual can be greatly improved by social learning, which is a combination of constructive, contextual and reflective learning from other people. Ma...

Climate change will cause large-scale plant migration. Seedling recruitment constitutes a bottleneck in the migration process but is itself climate-dependent. We tested the effect of warming on early establishment of three Arctic pioneer species, while holding other environmental variables constant. Seeds and bulbils were sown in artificial gaps in...

The agricultural policies shift gradually from EU-level organised market interventions to local organised environmental policies. This paper explores the growth possibilities of the Flemish dairy sector with the outlook of a quota abolishment as a case study of this policy shift. The dairy quota policy seems very restrictive for the highly profitab...

To explain over- and underuse of available quota, Buysse et al. (2007) have integrated the shadow cost of the quota constraint in a quota flexibility function in a positive mathematical programming model. This method and central hypothesis, formulated and tested for the case of Belgian sugar beet farms, is in current paper extended and confirmed fo...

The paper discusses an ex ante evaluation of the derogation on the Nitrates Directive for Flanders, Belgium, which is a case of intensive but highly productive livestock areas. The aim is to develop an accurate simulation model to detect small differences in manure surpluses caused by changes of manure production and/or utilization. The system of m...

Current thoughts on CAP changes, e.g. the "Health Check", emphasize the necessity to move away from payments based on historical receipts towards a "flatter rate" system. The aim of current research is to simulate the impact of a flat rate system (equal payments per hectare of cultivated land) compared to the current historical system (payments bas...

In 2005, 30% of the Flemish farms faced a manure excess, while at aggregated level still 9.7% of the emission rights were unused. This means that, despite the various possibilities, Flemish farmers do not succeed in an effective exchange of manure between farms. In current paper is shown how inorganic fertilizer use influences the use and exchange...

Summary • Climate projections suggest that extreme events will increase in frequency during this century. As tundra is recognized to be among the most vulnerable biomes, we exposed patches of arctic tundra vegetation to an experimental heatwave (by infrared irradiation), followed by a recovery period. The heating increased the surface temperature w...

Extreme temperature events are projected to increase in frequency in a future climate. As successive extremes could occur more frequently, patches of vulnerable tundra vegetation were exposed to two consecutive heat waves (HWs) of 10 d each, with a 5-d recovery period in between. Surface temperatures during the HWs were increased approximately 6 de...

Arctic ecosystems are known to be extremely vulnerable to climate change. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios project extreme climate events to increase in frequency and severity, we exposed High Arctic tundra plots during 8 days in summer to a temperature rise of approximately 9°C, induced by infrared irradiation, followed b...

Lengthening of the growing season at high latitudes, observed by satellites with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), has been ascribed to climate warming. To test this assumption, and to verify whether changes in vegetation greenness are quantitative or qualitative, we experimentally warmed patches of High Arctic tundra with infrared...

Tundra ecosystems constitute large stocks of carbon and might therefore, if climate warming releases CO2, induce positive feedback and amplify temperature increase. We studied the effect of a 2.5°C temperature increment, induced by controlled infrared irradiation, on various components of the carbon balance of a High Arctic tundra ecosystem at Zack...