Speaker
Description
Introduction
The contribution of healthy soils to One Health has been a widely researched topic lately and is theoretically already demonstrated (Banerjee and van der Heijden, 2023; van Bruggen et al., 2019). Acknowledging the extent of agricultural soil degradation, a radical shift to sustainable soil management (SSM) is needed to regenerate soils and move toward healthier soils at large scale.
However, in practice, many limits still make it difficult to demonstrate the effects of SSM on One Health in the field. Indeed, there is no harmonized existing protocol to assess SSM, soil health or even food quality, making it difficult to compare study results with each other. Also, most studies lack systemic approaches when assessing the effects of SSM on soil health, or other parameters of the One Health components, often considering a single practice (e.g. no-tillage) effect on soil health or on single soil properties. Furthermore, most agronomic researches currently rely on experimental plots, which is not satisfactory to provide a systemic and complete vision of the diversity of situations that may be encountered in the “real life”. This often makes the findings of these studies difficult to extend to larger scales (Lacoste et al., 2022). We propose to provide a feedback from a 2-year monitoring study where we attempted to overpass these limitations by setting-up a large on-farm experiment in North-Western France, through the monitoring of more than 80 winter wheat fields owned by pioneer farmers (+ 5 years after their transition to sustainable systems) and conventional farmers (tillage-based with little or no intercropping).
Material and methods
22 pioneers and 22 conventional farmers were selected in 2021 and associated by pairs of neighbouring farms located in North-Western France. Pioneer farmers were selected based on their compliance with conservation agriculture principles on field for at least 5 years according to the criteria defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2014) (i.e. minimal soil tillage or absence of soil tillage, crop diversification and/or complexification of crop rotation, and permanent organic covering of soils through introduction of cover cropping or mulching with crop harvest residues). Conventional farmers’ systems are tillage-based and their plots used for the study were ploughed at least 2 years before the beginning of the study. Each of the 22 pairs of farms have the same pedoclimatic conditions and are geographically close. The same wheat variety was grown within a pair of farmers. Each farmer committed to participate to the 2-year monitoring study by leaving available one plot grown with winter wheat for each year of study (i.e. in total 44 plots for campaign 2022 and 42 plots for 2023 - one pair of farmers dropped in 2023). This allowed us to monitor farmers’ agricultural practices and assess soil health and their grain production, with limited effects of environmental variables.
Results and discussion
We show that it is possible to set up a robust farmer network that discriminates agricultural management practices allowing to demonstrate the importance of SSM on One Health. We propose a feedback on the choice of indicators for assessing SSM, soil health and grain nutrient density, since some of them appear to be more relevant than others in such on-farm studies. We also propose a methodology to study direct and/or indirect effects of SSM on One Health. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of on-field One Health research applied to SSM. This on-farm study was made possible only thanks to the involvement of a diversity of stakeholders, thereby bridging gaps between farmers, the academic researchers and farm advisors.
References
Banerjee, S. & van der Heijden, M.G.A. 2023. Soil microbiomes and one health. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 21(1): 6–20. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-022-00779-w
van Bruggen, A.H.C., Goss, E.M., Havelaar, A., van Diepeningen, A.D., Finckh, M.R. & Morris, J.G. 2019. One Health - Cycling of diverse microbial communities as a connecting force for soil, plant, animal, human and ecosystem health. Science of The Total Environment, 664: 927–937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.02.091
FAO. 2014. L’agriculture de conservation. [Cited 13 September 2022]. https://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture/fr/
Lacoste, M., Cook, S., McNee, M., Gale, D., Ingram, J., Bellon-Maurel, V., MacMillan, T. et al. 2022. On-Farm Experimentation to transform global agriculture. Nature Food, 3(1): 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00424-4
| Keywords | Conservation agriculture; on-farm experiment; agroecology; transdisciplinarity; soil health |
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