Title: Soil conservation practices in organic farming: overview of French farmers’ experiences and contribution to future cropping systems design

In organic farming, as crops production is directly depending on soil quality, farmers pay attention to preserve soil ecosystem in order to benefit from better ecological services. Today, soil conservation practices, such as ploughless soil tillage and cover cropping, have gained prominence in organic cropping systems and provide for great potentials such as maintaining or increasing soil fertility, saving labor and reducing energy costs. This paper focuses on organic farmers who integrated or tended to integrate soil conservation practices in their cropping systems. The aims of this study are (i) to understand how these new combined practices are managed in relation to farmers’ objectives and constraints and (ii) to identify difficulties encountered by farmers and how they deal with it. This work provides a reference base for designing new organic cropping systems. Our study was based on 24 semi-structured interviews with farmers, having diverse farming systems and different levels of experience. They were located over France in various pedoclimatic situations. From these interviews, we developed a typology based on the frequency (occasional or systematic) of use of both ploughless soil tillage and cover crop along the crop rotation. Four different strategies were observed. We found two main factors to explain the diversity of strategies: (i) farmers’ objectives and (ii) capacity of adaptation facing constraints such as weed infestation, pedoclimatic conditions or equipment availability. Understanding these factors is a key issue for designing future sustainable organic cropping systems and find suitable solutions.