A web-based operational tool for the identification of best practices in European agricultural systems

Abstract

One of the current priorities of the new Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) is to overcome the serious environmental prob- lems raised by intensive agriculture. Despite the steps for- ward guaranteed by new technologies and innovations (e.g., IoT, precision agriculture), the availability of real operational tools, helping the member states to fulfill the high require- ments and expectations of the new CAP, is still lacking. To fill this gap, in the H2020 LandSupport project, the web- based best practice tool was developed to identify, on-the- fly, optimized agronomic solutions. The core of the tool is the ARMOSA process-based model, which dynamically sim- ulates several combinations of cropping systems, crops, ni- trogen fertilization rates, tillage solutions and crop residues managements for a specific region of interest. To identify the optimized solutions, it provides a synthetic “Best Practice in- dex”, which combines the production, nitrate leaching and SOC_change, according to the end-user dynamic requests. The tool was implemented for three case studies: March- feld Region in Austria, Zala County in Hungary, Campania Region in Italy, which are representative of a variety of dif- ferent pedoclimatic conditions. In the present work, three possible uses are shown to i) maximize the crop production; ii) evaluate the use of different crops and related practices; iii) evaluate the best practices in the nitrate vulnerable zones. The tool offers a close representation of actual and optimized cropping systems, with the possibility of further applications in other regional case studies, and in tailored scenarios, in which users enter their own input data.