Categorising combinations of farmers' land use practices: An approach based on examples of sheep farms in the south of France

Abstract

Territorial stakes that now include environmentally friendly agriculture and farmer participation in space management make it necessary to review farm diversity in order to include their spatial organisations in this re-qualification. The objective of our approach was to formally categorise farms on the basis of land use practices. For this, we used a set of examples of sheep farms in the south of France together with knowledge engineering methods. Using a combination of eight attributes that characterise the farmland use practices, we were able to work out four major farmland use prototypes. The general principles of this categorisation approach are innovative because of the chosen criteria (the farmland utilisation) and of the final form of the categories allowing to represent graduality. Results obtained make it possible to examine the relations of these farms to space and time, which could be of great interest for better understanding of farms' possible evolution in the current perspective of agriculture role in space management.