Developing agroecological practices requires an adequate work organization and available time to get involved in the needed collaborations (for instance in joint learning and discussion groups). The ability to free up this time remains a challenge in the context of livestock farming, characterized by tensions around work due to significant work durations, physically arduous tasks, and an aspiration for better well-being. Thus, the identification of working conditions suitable to collaboration and agroecological transition needs to be deepened.This study sheds light on these issues through an interdisciplinary research between livestock farming system approach and sociology initiated in 2022 in Brittany. Based on interviews conducted with around thirty dairy farmers with various farming systems in two distinct territories, a heterogeneity of situations was sought, i.e. with different degrees of involvement in groups and collective arrangements, as well as with different degrees of implementation of agroecological practices. The individual interviews made it possible to collect the necessary data to be analyzed according to a broad-wide analytical framework focused on farmer’s working conditions including their work organization, their past and present integration into peer networks and their level of agroecological transition. This exploratory study revealed that a high level of labour scale per worker (surface area per worker) paired with a degraded perception of farmers on their workload seems less favourable to the adoption of agroecological practices. In intermediary level of labour scale, different stages of agroecological transition have been found, possibly explained by different degrees of involvement in peer-to-peer collaborations. Several factors affect the ability to take part in such collaborations, beyond available time: social capital, acquaintance of the variety of existing farmers’ collectives, self-esteem, etc. This study enables to identify the obstacles and levers to support agroecological transition at the level of work, and involvement in collaborations between peers.