Tracking innovations for glyphosate-free in sloppy or terraced vineyard

Abstract

Context and purpose of the study. Reducing pesticide use such as glyphosate, is a key challenge to support sustainability of viticulture systems and resilience of vineyard. However, scientists argue that in certain situations, which they describe as “dead-ends”, reducing glyphosate use is particularly difficult because of structure of vineyard (Reboud et al., 2017). Then, our aim was to shed light on innovative practical solutions from winegrowers – focus on technics, equipment and collective action – to reduce the use of glyphosate in two “dead-ends” situations: sloppy and terraced vineyards.

Material and methods. We adapted a tracking on-farm innovation method (Salembier et al., 2021): (i) We identified 9 cases through exploring databases, professional viticulture press, and contacting extension agencies. (ii) We performed semi-structured interviews with winegrowers about innovation. (iii) We analyzed the systemic nature of innovation thanks to an in-depth inductive analysis of each case, relied on the concepts of coupled innovation (Meynard et al., 2017) and of action logic (Salembier et al., 2021). (iv) We built typologies through a cross analysis of the case studies.

Results. Three major results emerged: (i) First, we characterized five types of innovation on collective action that supported winegrowers’ access to key levers in weed management: 1) sharing resources (e.g. equipment, land, herd); 2) sharing labor (e.g. shared employee); 3) sharing technical management decision (e.g. collective decision in a common crop rotation); 4) developing a new resource (e.g. self-building an equipment adapted to sloppy or terraced vineyards); 5) accessing viticultural services. This typology corroborates and enhances the findings of Lucas et al. (2018). (ii) Secondly, we identified three types of innovation on equipment to perform weed management: 1) flexible use of an equipment (e.g. a seed drill for sowing on straw and on cover crops); 2) combining equipment to perform two tasks at the same time; 3) designing and building a new equipment (e.g. under-vine mowing tool for terraced vineyard). (iii) Finally, we identified 3 types of coupled innovations in vineyard. i) managing perennials on moderate to steep slopes (>30%), which is based on frequent tillage, using combinations of equipment (5 cases); ii) managing perennials on steep sloppy vineyards (30%) by covering the soil in inter-rows and employing moderate tillage under vine, which involves shared equipment and/or workforce (2 cases); and iii) weed management in terraced vineyards (30-40%) while limiting erosion and mitigating the challenges associated with working on steep slopes, through the use of self-built and shared equipment (2 cases). Our findings enrich the literature on coupled innovation in weed management strategies (Boulestreau et al., 2022), and it provides evidence on how these systemic innovations work to address technical and organizational issues, which allowed winegrowers to manage weeds and cover crops in situations considered as strongly dependent on glyphosate in “dead-ends” situations. The perspective of innovations identified is their environmental, social and economical evaluations. The sustainability validation of these practical solutions would then inspire other winegrowers engaged in the redesign of their vineyard system to be free from glyphosate.