Résumé
With the advent of agroecology, the challenge is to draw on the ecological services of the farming system to reduce the use of chemical inputs. This implies mobilizing a diversity of practices and plant and natural resources that interact in time and space. Given the complexity of the situations to be addressed, supporting the agro-ecological transition of farming systems is essential. One way of encouraging farmers to develop complex, systemic thinking is to enhance the value of peers’ collective experience within these systems, particularly through training. Indeed, analysing the activities of those working within these farming systems in transition reveals the knowledge acquired during this process and the typical phases of development they encounter. Analysing the functioning of the farming system in relation to its environment must therefore take into account different levels of analysis. In this study, we examined the transition of vineyards adopting a new soil maintenance practice that incorporates horse-drawn service providers to preserve soil and vines. Our research question was: How is cooperation constructed between winegrowers and service providers working with horses for soil maintenance over different time scales? Little is known about the pair between service providers and their horses in the agroecological transition of vineyards. We studied this cooperation on different time scales, from the short time of service provider-horse-soil interaction to the long-time of cooperation between service provider and winegrower.Among the various approaches analysing human activity, the course-of-action approach takes a holistic view of human activity, considering three levels of analysis (Poizat et al., 2023). The lower level considers the interaction between an actor and its environment at a given time t. In our case, it corresponds to the implementation of the practice of soil maintenance with a horse by the service provider at the plot level at a given time t. The middle level of analysis focuses on interactions within small collectives of actors “within narrow temporal, spatial and organizational boundaries” (Ibid., pp. 9-10). It corresponds to the farm level, which integrates the interactions and activities of several actors (winegrower, equine traction provider and horse) on a time scale of around ten years. The higher level of analysis extends temporal and spatial boundaries and is outside the scope of this research.The course-of-action program provides conceptual and methodological tools for studying activity as an asymmetrical coupling between an actor (service provider or winegrower) and its environment, with two ontological postulates. The postulate of enaction implies that activity is fundamentally situated and, in part, invisible to an outside observer. The second postulate states that an actor can describe and comment on their lived, situated, embodied experience if the research conditions are optimal for facilitating the actor’s explicitation of their lived experience.