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Agroecological transition necessitates a profound transformation of agricultural practices and systems, making them more complex. This transformation involves taking risks for the farmer: adopting new practices, developing new knowledge, acquiring new equipment, and valorizing new productions. While emerging technologies, particularly digital ones, have the potential to improve the daily lives of farmers, they can also lead to adverse effects. In this context, it is essential to study the relationships between considered innovations, the quality of life and autonomy of farmers, and the evolution of structures involved in agricultural activities. Technological innovations alone are not sufficient to support farmers in a successful transition and must be combined with organizational, economic, institutional, and political innovations. Establishing research and an ecosystem conducive to these combined transitions is a crucial cross-cutting action for their success, involving research and multi-actor partnerships with participatory science approaches.

Within the framework of the Agroecology and Digital program, the following research questions need to be addressed:

• What research and innovation programs and mechanisms are needed to accelerate the emergence and development of combined innovations and promote the scaling-up of agroecological transition?
• How can the adoption of technologies be promoted, and how can public authorities be assisted in their incentive policies to favor the most virtuous technologies?
• How to manage the tension between public goods, common goods, and private goods in the field of biodiversity and genetic resources and, more broadly, with data of all kinds produced in agriculture?
• What public policies should be developed to support these multiple co-transitions, with the aim of distributing values across all actors in the chain?

The funded projects contributing to this axis include:

• Targeted research projects at the start of the program:
  • CoEDiTAg, Co-evolution of equipment, digital technologies, and agroecological models
  • COBREEDING, Co-design of animal and plant selection schemes to improve multiperformance (economic, social, and environmental) and develop agroecological productions
  • LINDDA - Designing a living infrastructure for responsible digital technology in support of agroecological transition
• Winner of the 2023 Thesis and Postdoctoral Call for Projects:
  • "Development of a decision support tool to optimize spontaneous vegetation grazing based on a functional classification of pastoral resources" (thesis)