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At the beginning of the 1990s, community gardens were set up to jointly serve the aims of social work (or policies to combat social exclusion) and agriculture (generally organic and vegetable production). But in reality what was done in terms of setting up work cooperatives ? How has social assistance taken the environmental dimension into account ? What skills are required of supervisory staff ? This article will attempt to understand what agriculture can do for social work and also what social work can do for agriculture. Using both an ethnographical and comparative approach – participative observation with semi-guided interviews and comparison of structures (one in France and the other in the United States) respectively, we will show that – depending on the contexts – the inclusion of agricultural and environmental perspectives in the integration process can “legitimise” hybrid types of skills and atypical career paths. In these cases, accentuating the social role of sustainable agriculture can lead to the emergence of new professional profiles.