4. Conclusion

Agronomy has taken on a protean character over the course of time, and in the last century has been heavily dependent on scientific and industrial dynamics from outside. The organization of society, the challenges it faces, and the type of agronomy it has developed, both in terms of research topics and adapted methods, are all in line with each other. Agronomy thus reflects, sometimes with a slight time lag, the state of a society and an era. Although contemporaries are generally accustomed to seeing themselves as the culmination of a process rather than a stage in it, and thus to considering their mode of organization and thought as unsurpassable, predictions of the end of history have always proved wrong. There is no reason to believe that the current organization of agronomy – put in place since 1945 – is what it will be tomorrow.

If this principle proves to...