Patterns of work organisation in livestock farms: The ATELAGE approach

Expectations in terms of liveability are increasingly expressed by farmers within a context of society and market pressures on production processes and deep changes in farming itself (size of farms, workforce, off-farm activities, etc.), meaning that working conditions and the effectiveness of work organisation are critical issues today. In farming system modelling, farmers are portrayed as managers but not as work organisers; or workers. Very few disciplinary conceptual frameworks or methodologies contribute to producing knowledge on work organisation in livestock farms, taking production processes into account. In this document, we present an approach at farm scale called ATELAGE, which represents and assesses work organisation in livestock farms, and the use of this approach combined with a hierarchical clustering to identify different patterns of work organisation that take account of farm diversity in a farm group. ATELAGE is based on livestock farming systems and ergonomic concepts and approaches. Work organisation is described at the scales of both time periods within the year and the whole agricultural year by forms of daily organisation. Criteria are proposed to assess variations in work organisation, and labour division in particular, that take account of the solutions adopted by livestock farmers to manage livestock production processes, workforce and non-agricultural activities including breaks and holidays, throughout a yearly production cycle. Three patterns of organisation emerged from ten studied livestock farms. This approach allows us to better understand organisational patterns, the farmers' situations and their practices. And thus it contributes to the debate on assessments of the way a system operates and to the design of new systems that incorporate work organisation as a dimension. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.