The importance of the back-office for farm advisory services
Résumé
Advisory services must deal with new challenges. On the one hand, there is increasing uncertainty as to which agronomic systems and practices can enable farmers to integrate environmental and food safety issues e.g. pesticide use reduction, and to secure the economic performance of their farms. On the other hand, European agriculture is still characterised by a huge structural diversity in terms of farm size, level of specialisation or diversification, pluriactivity of agricultural households, etc. Such farm diversity generates a need for a variety of adapted technical solutions even when famers are confronted with a similar problem, e.g. how to cope with the diversification of crop rotation constraints. Thus, it is crucial to provide the diverse groups of farmers with empirical evidence on the effectiveness of alternative practices in their specific context of production. This article merges debates on the investments needed to produce relevant and robust evidence with those concerning the ongoing transformation induced by the privatisation of agricultural extension systems. It argues that if networking and brokering are key elements of the functioning of these systems, stronger attention should be given to back-office activities e.g. technology monitoring, training advisors, and production, collection and storage of technical knowledge.