Experimentation with innovative farming systems: methodological advances and operational networking

The ‘farming system’ trial is an important stage in the design and evaluation process for farming systems. It enables the technical feasibility and agronomic coherence of the most promising cropping systems to be tested in the field, and allows their agronomic and technical outcomes, as well as their socio-economic and environmental performance, to be assessed. It also provides a valuable forum for interdisciplinary exchange, which can be a source of innovation. In this article, we describe an approach to ‘crop system’ trials and its main methodological features in the field of crop rotation systems. We then present the methodological insights and tools developed to (i) facilitate the implementation and conduct of this type of experiment, and (ii) enable the operational networking of experiments testing, in diverse production contexts, cropping systems that address different challenges. Finally, we outline the structure and organisation of two French networks for ‘crop system’ trials : the “Innovative Farming Systems” Joint Technology Network for the arable and mixed cropping-livestock sectors, and the network initiated as part of the RotAB project for organic arable farming without livestock. Future research directions, including a cross-cutting analysis of results across trials and the dissemination of findings and performance data from the tested cropping systems, are discussed.