Conveners
Sustainable increase of productivity
- Gabriele Nerucci
- Tom Schut
Enhancing soil organic matter is key to sustainable viticulture. This study evaluates strategies to improve soil quality and viticultural performance in the Mediterranean. Winegrowers, acknowledging the impact of soil health on yield and resilience, are adapting to evolving policies like the anticipated glyphosate ban by turning to alternatives like cover crops for effective weed management...
High quantities of pesticides are applied in vineyards. A shift towards pesticide-free cropping systems, grounded in agroecological principles, is imperative for enhancing the sustainability of agriculture. To achieve this objective, farmers need to change their practices (Tittonell 2014). At the farm level, numerous agroecological practices, more or less effective, already exist but they must...
Introduction
Organic farming restricts the import of fertilisers to support crop and grassland production because it aims to rely on supplying nutrients to crops through managing soil fertility via rotations and the use of on-farm manures and crop residues rather than direct intervention. Designing rotations that effectively use nitrogen fixed by legumes is challenging, as the release of...
Introduction
Soil fertility management differs significantly in organic vs. conventional farming systems, as it ideally relies on closing nutrient cycles rather than on the use of external mineral fertilisers’ inputs. While nitrogen (N) fertility is relatively easy to manage through BNF, phosphorus (P) management is more challenging (Möller et al., 2018). Therefore, investigating soil P...
- Introduction
Growing spring poppy for bakery products has a long tradition in Central Europe. Mean spring poppy seed yields in Austria are with 75.0 g m-2 (2008–2017) quite low as spring poppy starts to flower late and drought during the transition from the vegetative to the generative phase can lead to significant yield reductions. Growing winter poppy instead of spring poppy might get...
Introduction
In conventional intensive banana monoculture systems, fertilization, mainly mineral-based, is managed to keep high levels of mineral elements in soil, in order to ensure maximal crop nutrition and compensate for leaching losses. It actually results in excessive applications of fertilizers, far surpassing plant’s uptake and soil absorption capacity (Godefroy & Dormoy,...
Introduction
It is well known that the pH of soils will impact on the yield of the crop, and the optimum pH for grasslands is around 6.0 while for arable crops the optimum pH is 6.5. Soil pH is usually tested and modified periodically with lime application to raise the pH as crop growth and associated management practices generally tend to reduce the pH over time. To demonstrate the value of...
