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Farmers’ fears and agro-economic evaluation of sown grass strips in France

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Abstract

Since 2005, French farmers must set up sown grass strips along rivers in order to decrease pesticide levels and soil erosion. Farmers have thus parcelled out their fields, set aside 3% of their farm size and managed grass without herbicide. Consequently, this environmental policy may cause farmers’ fears due to economic losses and weed infestations of their field margins. Here, we studied farmers’ perception of sown grass strips. First, we interviewed 29 farmers in two French regions. Second, we evaluated the economic loss of gross margin when replacing crop by grass. Third, we evaluated the weed risk using flora surveys in sown grass strips. Our results showed that two thirds of interviewed farmers thought that sown grass strips affected their farm revenue and represented a weed risk. Concerning economy, we found that farmers loose from 358 to 853€/ha the year of installation and from 126 to 641€/ha next years. This economic loss is mainly due to the loss of crop production, with a minor impact of grass management cost. At the farm level, 3% of sown grass strips decreased the farm revenue by 7%. Concerning the weed risk, the farmers’ perception was linked with the presence of some competitive perennial weeds, e.g. Cirsium arvense, and wind-dispersing weeds, e.g. Asteraceae. Sown grass strips with high weed species richness of 26 species on average, or with dominance of non-sown species (16.7% of sown grass strips) did not affect the farmers’ perception. In our study, the economic loss was weak and acceptable at the farm level.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by grants from ANR Ecoger, ANR-STRA-1 08-02 and INRA. The authors thank Fabrice Dessaint and Sandrine Petit for their help. We also thank Rémi Bonnot and the farmers of the two sites for their assistance in the sown grass strips surveys. We thank Jean-Luc Demizieux and the anonymous reviewers for their help in reviewing the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRA, UMR1210, Biologie et Gestion des Adventices, 21000, Dijon, France

    Stéphane Cordeau, Xavier Reboud & Bruno Chauvel

  2. INRA, UMR1210, Biologie et Gestion des Adventices, 21065, Dijon cedex, France

    Bruno Chauvel

Authors
  1. Stéphane Cordeau
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  2. Xavier Reboud
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  3. Bruno Chauvel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruno Chauvel.

Additional information

Selected article from the International Conference on Weed Biology, Dijon, France, 2009.

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Cordeau, S., Reboud, X. & Chauvel, B. Farmers’ fears and agro-economic evaluation of sown grass strips in France. Agronomy Sust. Developm. 31, 463–473 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-011-0004-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-011-0004-6

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