~Michel Meuret, Ph.D. - Research Director, National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA)

Excerpt from Program:
"Shepherds have worked in Southern France since the Roman Age. Before World War II, they were mostly the family's youngest boys who didn't go to school. Many shepherds also came from neighbouring countries with strong pastoral cultures, such as Italy and Spain. They were sometimes paid with money, but sometimes with a bottle of wine and a piece of cheese. Today, most men and women who want to become shepherds are young French people living in big cities. They have no family history of shepherding, and they are searching for a better life and working conditions. They wanted to work alone in the company of a flock of sheep in a mountain wilderness. But we are in Old Europe, today a place with strong renewal of both agricultural and environmental policies, which deeply impact a shepherd's job. On the one hand, globalization is affecting even small villages and the market price for sheep meat is dropping constantly such that livestock producers are less able to pay a shepherd salary. On the other hand, European environmental policies urge local territories to support prescribed grazing to help restore and conserve endangered wildlife habitats. Thus, many livestock producers and shepherds, old and young alike, are now engaged in wildfire prevention and habitat conservation through grazing. Experienced shepherds are key sources of knowledge, and some land managers want to profit from their empirical know-how for developing relevant grazing prescriptions. This is not an easy job, as most livestock producers consider shepherds farm workers, and most shepherds don't want to become strict 'land gardeners'. It is then necessary to redefine the shepherd's job as a multi-functional position at the crossroads between animal production and nature conservation. As an animal scientist and ecologist working with livestock advisors and teachers at shepherding schools, I brought to light the importance of taking into account the experienced shepherds' empirical knowledge about how to graze their animals on landscapes. The design of daily grazing circuits that stimulates the herd's appetite on coarse vegetation (i.e. a Menu suited for prescribed grazing) illustrates the richness of such knowledge for reaching simultaneously low fossil fuel input in animal production and gentle, but efficient, land biodiversity conservation."