Agronomy: sciences of the alive in the participative ing

The world of agricultural engineers, agronomic research and agri-food sector players in general, both nationally and internationally, has been regularly confronted over the past twenty years with health, environmental and economic "crises" –– which, one after the other, have undermined the consensus that emerged after the Second World War around a model of agriculture generally referred to as the "Green Revolution". The Green Revolution project was inspired and made possible by the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the triumph in the first half of the 20th century of Taylorist rationalization of work: fragmentation and specialization of work, organization of the factory as a closed, controlled production space, mechanization of work, standardization of products and tools, lengthening of production and marketing chains. The application of this production model to agriculture was made possible by the rise of modern chemistry and genetics.

Faced with the diversity of its terroirs, and particularly of its soils, agriculture has historically had to deal with the constraints of the environment. When it failed to do so, it was at its own expense and that of the societies it supported: environmental degradation and famine have punctuated the history of agriculture. The technical package of the Green Revolution made it possible to partially overcome these constraints: a combination of powerful tools capable of reshaping space and controlling water (drainage, irrigation, etc.), synthetic chemical fertilizers, and the development of new technologies.Genetics, selection and biotechnology produce homogeneous seeds and breeds, sometimes going as far as cloning to obtain a perfectly homogeneous population with supposedly predictable behavior. This way of thinking, aimed at total control of all the system's components, finds its ultimate culmination in soilless greenhouse agriculture, in which all the factors – nutrition, temperature, carbon dioxide-enriched atmosphere, lighting, etc. – are controlled. The industrialization of agriculture through the artificialization of the environment and the commodification of living organisms completes the paradigm. In terms of productivity per worker and mass production in the short and medium term, this agricultural model has perfectly achieved its objectives, as has its industrial model. The abundance of food, at least in wealthy countries, echoes the abundance of manufactured goods.

However, by the very fact of its success and generalization, the industrialization of agriculture has also revealed the other side of the coin. In addition to the problems inherent in the industrial model of production and consumption (energy dependency, increased pollution, crises of overproduction leading to mass unemployment...), it has also produced...