Expérimentation d'une méthode de travail des conseillers auprès des agriculteurs d'un quartier ou d'une commune

An experimental method used by advisors among the farmers of one small district or commune -The setting-up of intense social contacts between the farmers concerned is the necessary preliminary to an attempt at modernisation encouraged by agricultural organisations and technicians. A specialist cannot give the necessary impetus to a project within a group if the project has not emerged from a living local exchange of aspirations and observations. But economic growth breaks up the traditional means of direct social communication. The vast majority of farmers therefore need a « personalised agent » to establish contacts, an agricultural advisor who prepares the ground for the intervention of specialists from official bodies of all kinds, by encouraging requests for meetings. The method of « pre-extension-work » proposed here is based on the interaction of two means of expression. One is individual : interviews. The other is collective : the meeting of a local group. The experiments carried out with this method in Lorraine and Berri have brought to light the main stumbling-block to each of the technical stages of this restructuring of society : the technicians' fears lest they do not immediately arrive at a list of advice or at a programme of action. But these exchanges are stimulated all the more when the principal aim is not to encourage new projects but simply to help the farmers to learn to be able to control changes that they must inevitably face.