EcoViti: a systemic approach to design low pesticide vineyards

Abstract: With the emergence of a social pressure for an “environmentally friendly” agriculture,the reduction of pesticide use is a key component of sustainable agriculture. Despite the effortsmade toward a lower use of pesticides, some limits have been reached. To go further, a moreintegrated modification of the crop management system becomes necessary. The EcoViti projectproposes a method for prototyping new vineyard cropping systems at field scale. The method isbased on expert knowledge, conceptual modelling and field experiments in a coordinatednetwork of experimental platforms. This systemic approach has several differences with theclassical experimental approach, either in the design of the experiments or in the projectmanagement, which are discussed here.