The pursuit of agroecological principles by Flemish beef farmers Advancing towards a body of thought for sustainable food systems Louis TESSIER Thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du grade de Docteur en sciences agronomiques et ingénierie biologique Encadrée par : Philippe BARET (UCL) et Fleur MARCHAND (ILVO, UA) JURY: Président Pierre BERTIN (UCL) Membres Jo BIJTTEBIER (ILVO) Pierre GASSELIN (INRA) Patrick MEYFROIDT (UCL) Rebecka MILESTAD (KTH) Collection de thèses de l’Université catholique de Louvain, 2021 The pursuit of agroecological principles by Flemish beef farmers This research was financed by the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Own Capital Fund (EV-ILVO) and conducted at the ILVO Social Science Unit in Merelbeke over the period of November 2016 to October 2020, in cooperation with the research group SyTra at the Earth & Life Institute in Louvain- la-Neuve. The fruit of this cooperation is the doctoral dissertation presented in this manuscript. Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek – Landbouw & Maatschappij Burgemeester Van Gansberghelaan 115 9820 Merelbeke (Belgium) Unversité catholique de Louvain-La-Neuwe, Earth & Life Institute, Transition of Food Systems Croix du Sud 2, B367 1045 Louvain-La-Neuve (Belgium) Diffusion : www.i6doc.com, l’édition universitaire en ligne Sur commande en librairie ou à Diffusion universitaire CIACO Grand-Rue, 2/14 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique Tél. 32 10 47 33 78 Fax 32 10 45 73 50 [email protected] Distributeur pour la France : Librairie Wallonie-Bruxelles 46 rue Quincampoix - 75004 Paris Tél. 33 1 42 71 58 03 Fax 33 1 42 71 58 09 [email protected] 2 Be ruthless with systems, be kind with people. Michael Brooks, 1989-2020 3 The pursuit of agroecological principles by Flemish beef farmers 4 Summary The current global food system's sustainability challenges have prompted an expanding academic field and social movement to foster agroecology as a possible solution. In Belgium too, this moment of urgency and of opportunities is grasped by a variety of actors and organizations to promote agroecology at different political levels and sectors of society. The research presented here focuses on the beef sector in Flanders, as it faces growing economic uncertainty and societal criticism. Several authors have proposed agroecology as a more sustainable, alternative development pathway to livestock systems in temperate regions. But what agroecology precisely entails in the context of beef farming in Flanders is largely unexplored. Given the current challenges in Flanders’ beef sector and the lack of scientific understanding of what agroecology may entail in this specific context, this research aimed at investigating the relevance of agroecology to Flemish beef farming. The thesis put forward in this dissertation is that an analysis of the actions and perspectives of a diverse group of Flemish beef farmers will lead to an empirically grounded theory, giving insight into the relevance of agroecology in the context of beef farming in Flanders. We focused on three research questions in particular: (i) what actions can and do these beef farmers take to put agroecology into practice; (ii) what is the role of these farmers’ agency in the application of agroecological insights; (iii) wat social-material processes and conditions contribute or limit the application of agroecological insights at these farms? Informed by critical realist philosophy, we developed a mixed methods research design for the reasons of expansion and complementarity. Data were collected on each of the 37 farms with three methods: (i) a structured questionnaire to gather information on structural farm characteristics, (ii) a semi-structured interview in which farmers were confronted with a comprehensive list of principles covering the techno-productive, ecological, social-economic, social- cultural and social-political dimensions of agroecology, and (iii) a direct structured elicitation method to obtain farmer-constructed cognitive maps (CMs) to study farmer’s perspectives about and in relation to farm functioning. Before our own field work, we conducted an exploratory analysis of census data informed by expert knowledge. This led to the construction of an original structural typology based on herd composition. The analysis of farm census data from 2011 revealed that beef farms in Flanders are incredibly diverse in terms of structural characteristics. This insight informed our theoretical sampling strategy to select farmers for interview along three axes: organic/conventional, with/without direct selling, and from specialized to diversified agricultural activities. We explored a comprehensive understanding of agroecology as a practice by confronting the selected 5 The pursuit of agroecological principles by Flemish beef farmers beef farmers in 37 on-farm interviews with 13 principles distilled out of the agroecological literature. A grounded analysis of the transcripts supported by the relevant scientific literature and ILVO expert advice, led to the identification of 690 different practices which were grouped in 36 Pathways of Actions (POA), each linked to one of the 13 principles discussed with farmers. As such, this research took a first major step to concretize agroecology as a practice in this context. To understand how these principles fit together, we compared the sets of practices of these farmers by using this conceptual framework of 36 POAs, now as an analytical framework. By means of an original scoring system and archetypal analysis, we identified three distinct farming models to which each of these farmers member of in different degrees, based on the practices they mentioned. One farming model represents seven conventional farmers who name a bare minimum of practices contributing to agroecology, and two models representing farmers that integrate multiple elements of agroecology. Conceptually, the second farming model, corresponds with a low-input, low-capital, but knowledge intensive model, embedded within alternative commercial and social network, which actively seeks to become independent from regime institutions. The third farming model finds advantages within the mainstream market environment. It overlaps with a number of practices related to the techno-productive dimension of agroecology with the second model, as far as these maintain or increase productivity, and are compatible with the expectations of value-chain actors. As such this comparative analysis an classification of farmers revealed to us that technical and social reconfigurations along agroecological lines in Flanders go hand in hand. However, as none of the interviewed farmers represented these models in a pure state. In fact, our results indicate that many farmers are situated in between these farming models to different degrees. The study of the elicited CMs by farmers led to the identification of a connectivity of multiple functional processes of importance to these farmers. Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques to compare the gathered maps, content differences in the maps were revealed, indicating to us that farmers’ goals and views are constitutive of the way their farm effectively operates. With CMing we thus ended up affirming their agency in farm functioning. Our attention was also drawn to the importance attributed to income generation by almost all farmers, as well as the complex causal relationships expressed by some farmers in their maps between their involvement in alternative markets and more diverse and less input intensive agricultural practices. This led us to examine the role of market dependence and agroecology in this context. As we found market dependence in agroecological and associated literature undertheorized, we constructed an analytical framework of market dependence in which a general, neo-Marxian understanding of a capitalist economic system and a New Economic Sociology conception of embedded markets was integrated in a critical realist theory of human behavior. In a new round of analysis of gathered data we applied these analytical lenses. We found all farmers to be embedded and reproduce an economic system that puts severe constraints on their ability and 6 willingness to put agroecology in action. We also noted there is air in the system for agroecology, however, in that the freedom of the market allows farmers to negotiate, refuse terms, re-arrange their resources, co-operate with others. Such social actions often give them more room for maneuver, though this is not necessarily used to put agroecology into practice. The air in the system is limited, however, as alternative but market-based economic arrangements are continuously undermined by the very social relations that constitute them: e. g. farmers competing for resources and customers, excluding each other from resources and information, unwillingness to cooperate. Based on these revealed patterns, we argue that the either lacking or concretistic theorization of the global economic system by agroecological and food system transition theorists results in arbitrary ideal-typical classifications of farmers, attitudes, social networks and practices with no convincing material basis. Instead, the existence of a global economic system constituted by objective personal and impersonal social relations in which both alternative and not so alternative farmers are embedded and are by economic necessity compelled to reproduce, appears to be a much more plausible hypothesis. Along the way, we made in this