Keeping the Actors in the Organic System Learning: The Role of Organic Farmers’ Experiments

The performance of agriculture worldwide clearly shows that the current mainstream agricultural pathway is not sustainable, causing a diversity of ecological, social and economic problems (McIntyre et al., 2009). Currently, innovation (e.g. Smits et al., 2010; EU SCAR, 2012) is seen as the buzzword and the key concept for supporting the urgently needed pathways or transition towards sustainability (van de Kerkhof & Wieczorek, 2005) or towards resilient societies (Folke et al., 2010; Leach et al., 2012), particularly in organic farming. Organic farming has contributed to multiple aspects of sustainability, especially concerning (new/innovative) on-farm production methods (Darnhofer, 2014a, Moeskops et al., 2014).