In the field of crop protection, these mechanisms must be mobilized at different scales to be effective:
- Plant
- parcel
- cultivation system
- farm
- landscape
Biodiversity directly contributes to this, in particular through the natural regulation of pests. It must therefore be preserved and studied to amplify these regulation phenomena.
Some practices only make sense at supra-farm scales (e.g. planting hedges) and must be integrated into commodity or territorial organization logics to create the conditions for the expected synergies or complementarities (e.g. spatio-temporal organization of cropping systems, interactions between crops and livestock, etc.).
This new paradigm therefore requires, in addition to acquiring new knowledge, increased risk-taking by field actors with changes in practices that sometimes require a complete redesign of the production system, the substitution of one technique for another no longer being sufficient and a source of uncertainty.
To support these transitions, Acta and its network are renewing their support tools and methods and are involved in many schemes that contribute to the acquisition of agro-ecology references, the evaluation of innovative solutions, and the dissemination of results. For example, Acta acoordinates, within the framework of the Ecophyto plan, a network of long-term experimentation projects, DEPHY EXPE, which designs and tests agro-ecological systems that use pesticides as a last resort. It leads a platform for managing and capitalizing on knowledge in agro-ecology, GECO, for agricultural development actors. It participates in Mixed Technology Networks (RMT) that study the natural regulation of bio-aggressors (RMT Bioreg) or the reconnection between crop systems and livestock systems at the farm or territorial level (RMT SPICEE).
Acta and its network are fully invested in the engineering of agro-ecological systems: from their design to their testing, including the evaluation of their performance.
