Title: Reducing pesticide use on dairy farms? - New study says it's possible
Summary: Reducing pesticide use on dairy farms cannot be separated from work management. Because of the heavy and constrained workload of livestock systems, it can be difficult to reallocate work from the livestock system to the cropping system to implement alternative practices that can be work-intensive. Alternative practices can also be knowledge-intensive and may incur additional mental workload. Thus, work, in its multiple dimensions, may be a factor, often forgotten, that limits implementation of alternative practices to reduce pesticide use, depending on the amount of change they require, particularly on dairy farms.
Most of the work difficulties that experts mentioned in the study concerned work organisation and skills and knowledge. They never mentioned mental workload as an obstacle to implementing alternative practices but did mention a heavy workload affecting farmers' ability to change practices.
Focusing on two substitution practices (using resistant crop varieties, mechanical weed control) and one redesign practice (extending crop rotations), the study found that work organisation was influenced more by redesign practices than by substitution practices, but only in the first step of the former. In the second step of redesign practices, work organisation can be alleviated. The three practices are also all skill- and knowledge-intensive, but in different ways. Using resistant crop varieties implies having access to the necessary information (e.g., the level of resistance to a given pathogen or pest), while implementing mechanical weed control involves training, investment or outsourcing. Extending crop rotations implies having the means, time and autonomy to think about new rotations.
This study improves understanding of the main obstacles related to work issues of alternative practices in order to identify specific mechanisms or actions to help farmers implement them. The study contributes to the ongoing debate in the field of research on the adoption of alternative practices to pesticides, which is currently dominated by cost-effectiveness and behavioural factor studies.
The study confirms the importance of considering more structural factors in public policies, such as workload, skills and knowledge, and work organisation. For example, new public policies could take into account the employment criterion, both in terms of quantity and quality.
New policies could provide support not only for the technical aspects of alternative practices to pesticides but also on but also for work-related aspects, for example by focusing on availability requirements so that farmers can attend training courses.
