Luxembourgish farmers’ lack of information about grain legume cultivation

Abstract

Grain legume production in Europe has decreased in recent years, while legume demand has rapidly increased due to growth of meat production. Therefore, Europe imports grain legumes, principally soybeans, to meet feed protein requirements. Various investigations have identified problems and benefits of local grain legume cultivation. Nevertheless, grain legume cultivation has still not increased in the last years. Studies investigating why farmers do not cultivate grain legumes are missing. Here, we surveyed the knowledge of farmers about grain legume cultivation, problems and constraints of grain legume cultivation and the barriers faced by and incentives needed by farmers. We sent a questionnaire to 1373 farmers in Luxembourg, with a response rate of 29 %. Results show that only 17 % of all the responding farmers cultivated grain legumes; 88 % of the conventional farmers did not cultivate grain legumes, while 85 % of the organic farmers did. We observed that Luxembourgish farmers feel badly informed about grain legume cultivation; organic farmers generally feel better informed than their conventional colleagues. The main barrier, named by Luxemburgish farmers to not cultivate grain legumes, is not economic issues but a lack of knowledge and extension services for these crops. Main incentives needed to start grain legume cultivation in the future are economic issues. Even though grain legume producers mentioned several negative experiences with grain legume cultivation, they are not discouraged by the poor economic conditions and appreciate the benefits of grain legume cultivation. Overall, our findings show that research results on grain legume should be better disseminated to extension services and farmers.

Socio-technical lock-in hinders crop diversification in France

“…Other approaches and theoretical frameworks, in agronomy or economics, could have been used to analyze the increase in areas of major crops and the decline of minor crops, and to model these trends. Several studies, based on such disciplinary approaches, are quoted in our paper (for example, in agronomy, Schott et al 2010;Ponisio et al 2015;Zimmer et al 2016;in economics, Fares 2006;Filippi et al 2008;Louhichi et al 2017). However, the complex and systemic characters of specialization led us to overpass these disciplinary approaches, to adopt a holistic perspective of the involved socio-technical factors.…”

“…This resulted from yield increase and input use reduction on the subsequent wheat (compared to wheat following wheat). The lack of similar references for all minor crops, in the different agro-climatic areas, is an impediment to diversification, as confirmed by Zimmer et al (2016) in Luxembourg.…”

“…Although the agronomic benefits of diversification are well demonstrated (IPES-food 2016), the farmers in the survey emphasized that precise references as to the agronomic consequences, in a given region, from the introduction of a given crop into a given rotation were missing (confirmed by Duc et al 2010;Zimmer et al 2016, for grain legumes). Some experts mentioned the source of funding of Technical Institutes, based on a contribution proportional to the volume of harvest of each crop, as an obstacle to the amount of knowledge production on minor crops.…”

Innovating within or outside dominant food systems? Different challenges for contrasting crop diversification strategies in Europe

“…Despite such well-known benefits, various studies have shown the adoption of diversification practices to be limited by barriers at all levels of food systems. These barriers are related to "regime rules" [19] historically established to support largescale specialisation and short-term maximisation of profits with chemical inputs [16,31,[35][36][37][38]. We posit that crop diversification is specifically relevant as it can be promoted both outside and within the regime [2,30].…”

Diversity of protein-crop management in western France

“…Expanding production of grain legumes also faces difficulties due to technological lock-in of production systems, resulting from co-evolution of interrelated organizations, technologies, knowledge, values, and environments, which discourages actors from adopting alternative technologies, even if they are more beneficial (Magrini et al 2016). For example, a recent study of farmers in Luxembourg identified that a major obstacle to growing grain legumes is a lack of knowledge about them and of extension services for them (Zimmer et al 2016).…”