Salaried shepherd’s roles and skills in suckler ewe breeding in South-East of France ; Rôles et compétences des bergers.ères salariés.ées dans les exploitations ovines allaitantes de la région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur

This study aims to characterize shepherd’s expected roles and skills as shepherds are important stakeholders in pastoral breeding’s challenges. So, shepherd learning is important.This is why a work group with stakeholders of the ovine sector in South-east of France was gathered to think about the shepherd learning improvement. This study has to be a base of the thought about the need of shepherd learning in South-east of France by synthesizing field data. To carry this field data, the heart of this study is a survey of shepherds and shepherd’s employers. They were interviewed about their vision of salaried shepherd’s skills and the level of autonomy and technicity they have. In addition, members of the work group and natural spaces managers were interviewed about their expectations for the shepherd learning. This study was concluded by an oral restitution of the results with the group work in order to discuss it and start the thought about the learning. Their remarks were included in this report.We see in this study, that shepherds work in diverse work situations from keeping ewes in different backgrounds (alpage, hill, lowland) until the sheep pen to assure lambing and diverse sheep pen works. Shepherds can work in several work situations in a year. To do that, they have to master very different skills, often in a high level of autonomy and technicity. Those skills take place in diverse domains as feeding and nursing of the herd, predation, shepherd’s health and security and relational with other users of pastures and employer.Among those skills, management of varied usages of pastures, of guard dogs and mental load are more and more pregnant for shepherds and so they will have to be developed in the future learning.Data from this study reach the objective because they can be used to think about the improvement of shepherd learning in South-east of France. But there is a lack of quantitative data, so this study can be completed by a quantitative study about the need of shepherds in the area. ; L’étude visait à ...