ASTER (for Agrosystems, Territoires and Ressources) research station is based in the eastern part of France, Mirecourt, Vosges https://aster.nancy.hub.inrae.fr/. We are a team of agronomists (at the farm and territory levels), zootechnicists and geographer. We aim at studying food systems and agroecological farming systems. We run a long term experiment on our organic experimental farm, where are recorded soil, plant, animal data as well as working time and accounting data, in order to assess resiliency and efficiency of the system. We are interested in participating to the AGROECOLOGY CALL and we aim to meet parties from the agroecology community, and to constitute a synergical consortium.

Our long term organic farm experiment is conducted at INRAE research station based in Mirecourt, France (48◦17’41.287’’N, 6◦07’19.66’’E). This farm is composed of 135 ha of permanent grassland and 106 ha of arable land, mainly on clay and clay-loam soils. Thes system is designed according to a ’step-by-step’ design mode whose aim is to constantly improve the system on the basis of experience acquired during the experiment. Since 2016, the farm experiment aims for self-sufficiency and reducing land use competition, annual crops being strictly intended for human food. Some 20 species are grown on the arable lands (milling wheat, malting barley, oats for flaking, lentils, green peas, oilseed rape, sunflower, camelina, potatoes, onions, etc.). A sheep herd (19 livestock units) was introduced at the end of 2017 and kept in the open air to most efficiently use grassland resources that were difficult to be grazzed by cattle (123 livestock units), especially in winter. The dairy cows are kept on full-season once-a-day milking, with heifers suckled by nurses. All sheep and cattle are strictly grass-fed. Finally, approximately thirty pigs are fattened each year. The pigs are raised in the open air, grazing on a plot of alfalfa grass and making use of products unmarketable for human consumption (annual crop waste, milk with high cell counts, etc.).