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The financial aids to agriculture to maintain landscapes or to encourage quality labels approaches lead to reappraising management practices at the field and farm levels even when such aids are uncertain. In such situations the biotechnical (agronomy and animal) and ecological sciences are unable to define these new management practices on their own, especially as their knowledge is not produced at the scale on which technical decisions are elaborated. We show how concepts coming from production management science can be used to organise and steer the production of biotechnical knowledge in order to design appropriate coaching tools to guide the transformation of agricultural activities. Taking the case of land use in grazing systems, we show the value of using management science concepts such as flow management, planning and monitoring adapted to agricultural specificities, to develop frameworks for analysing farm production activities. We then propose a conceptual model of forage production practices that takes into account both the characterisation of land resources and production and sustainability aims. As an illustration we present two different livestock production systems where reorganisation is needed for a variety of reasons: production cost reduction, quality labels or land sustainability aims. We show how this frame work may be used to drive research in grassland science in order to build relevant decision tools for forage management.