Use of the French Land Parcel Identification System for Inter farms new Organisation Design

Agronomists have long expertise in designing new cropping systems to face environmental issues like water resource pollution, soil erosion or biodiversity reduction. They also have designed new theoretical spatial organizations of land use embracing these new cropping systems and analyzed individual farmer constraints for the set-up of these spatial organizations. But very little has been done about local land recombination between farms (LRBF) to overcome the limitation of an individual farm approach. LRBF corresponds to time-limited field exchanges between farmers, mostly for cash crop return period constraints. If they are well driven, such LRBFs could, for instance, help reduce pesticide load on risk areas. We propose a global design method to facilitate new LRBF design: (step 1) identification of existing situations of LRBF on large agricultural areas, (step 2) analyse of their socio-technical determinants by farmers’ surveys and (step 3) support the design of environmental friendly LRBF in real situations. The first step of the method, presented in this paper, is based on the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) which is the tool used by the European Union to determine, every year, the eligibility of agricultural land for the subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy. Beyond the administrative purposes, LPIS data can be used to describe agricultural landscape dynamics but LPIS are complex to use. For instance, in the French LPIS, called RPG (Registre Parcellaire Graphique), the elementary geometry is the farmer’s block which associates several adjacent fields if they belong to the same farm. Crucial farmer’s block attributes like the anonymized farm number and even the polygon identity code are voluntarily changed every year. Hence, a landscape level use of the RPG requires the development of specific agrogeographical models. RPG Explorer is a computer tool integrating a range of models and procedures to ease the use of RPG data. For the first step of our method we used it to ease the analysis of land recombination between farms. We applied it on different French regions (NUTS 3 European level) and we proposed a first typology of LRBF situations based on criteria, such as the number of farms involved in each type of LBRF, the frequency of land recombination or the type of crops driving the land recombination. This typology will be then improved through farmers’ surveys (second step of the methodology) for a better understanding of the socio-technical determinants of LRBF and finally the design of new LRBF (third step)