L’Atelier Paysan is a collective of small-scale farmers, employees and agricultural development organisations, gathered together as a cooperative and it aims for the dissemination and the repossession of agricultural knowledge by farmers. The project started in 2009 at ADABio, a local association of organic producers, but very quickly grew to such a large scale that in 2011 a transitional association was created and then converted into a cooperative in 2014: L’Atelier Paysan Atelier Paysan works on the technical and technological sovereignty of farmers through an open source resource platform for farm production tools. Farmers find in Atelier Paysan the possibility of collectively developing tools and buildings adapted to their agro-ecological practices. Farmers can at the same time access online resources, videos, trainings on construction and autonomy but also take part in organised training sessions where they learn from the knowledge broker and their peers. The cooperative works in four axis: - Supporting farmer-led research and development - Disseminating open source materials for organic farming -Leading training sessions to create self-sufficient farming systems -Adapting the tools to the context in which they are used In concrete terms, the Atelier Paysan designs machines and buildings with farmers, in self-service (documentation without a patent available free of charge on the website), then organizes training sessions on self-construction, during which farmers are introduced to metalworking and woodworking. Around 80 training sessions are opened each year. Teaching methods are collective and are both vertical, with a “knowledge broker” and horizontal, to encourage farmers from the same area to collaborate. At the end of each training sessions, farmers can bring home the tools their learnt to make. The farmers are directly involved in the decision-making processes of Atelier Paysan and thus to have a say in the direction the cooperative takes. This ensures there is critical feedback on the technologies developed and promoted.

L’ Atelier Paysan contributes to the autonomy of farmers by appropriating knowledge and know-how around farm tools. Believing that farming skills are common goods which should be freely disseminated and adapted, the technologies and practices developed through farmer-led research and development are freely accessible through articles, designs and tutorials, on our website or in our Self-build guide, a 250 manuscript documenting 16 tools adapted to organic farming. - Their internet forum acts like a collective sketch-book making farmer-driven innovations visible and accessible to other farmers. Farmer-led initiatives are compiled into technical factsheets with photos, videos and testimonies documenting the tools and infrastructure developed by farmers. More than 500 technical factsheets have already been compiled. - There is prototyping and farm-testing of tools that are produced as open source design and disseminated through workshops and training courses.