18th Congress of the European Society for Agronomy

Service crops into crop rotations may provide ecosystem services and reduce dependency to inputs. Its relay intercropping into a winter cereal allows better conditions for service crop emergence in spring, compared to summer sowing, with limited risks for crop productivity (Gardarin et al., 2022). Nevertheless, sowing the service crop into an established crop is constraining and may hinder its...

Introduction

Sowing winter oilseed rape (WOSR, Brassica napus subsp. napus) with other species has been promoted in Europe for the last 10 years. Various advantages were pointed, like enhanced nitrogen nutrition (Lorin et al., 2016), improved weed control (Lorin et al., 2015) and less insect pest pressure (Breitenmoser et al., 2022). However, in the practice, farmers face difficulties to...

1. Introduction: Cocoa production is recognized as a main factor of forest loss and biodiversity declined in west Africa[3]. Thus, agroforestry is being promoted to restore a minimum forest cover, to conserve biodiversity, and to reinstate key ecosystem services in agricultural landscape. This introduced the Cocoa Forest Initiative in Ivory Coast and Ghana and several certifications for...

Introduction
Crop-livestock integration and crop diversification are major levers for the development of agroecology and for improving farming system resilience by e.g. limiting disease pressure, optimizing the use of nutrients and regulating the water cycle (Lin, 2011; Martin et al., 2016). However, their implementation on the long term by farmers is a challenge, as they require an...

1. Introduction:
   Agricultural systems are vulnerable to pressure from multiple drivers, i.e. today’s agricultural landscapes are neither sustainable in terms of long-lasting (Agovino et al. 2019), nor are farms resilient in terms of responsive to (external) pressures (Meuwissen et al. 2020) .
   Prevailing productivity-oriented management practices have led to structurally simplified...

Planning for sustainable agricultural landscapes requires a comprehensive understanding of the needs of stakeholders. To achieve a sustainable agricultural system, the implementation of different strategies for diversification has been a promising approach. These strategies can target the overall landscape complexity to benefit biodiversity or diversify cropping systems to enhance and...

Sowing a legume crop every third year in a crop rotation of cereal and canola can be profitable while increasing the resilience and sustainability of modern farming systems. Some of the benefits include increased soil nitrogen (N) availability and improved rotational and environmental outcomes. In no-till farming systems, sowing large-seeded legumes into retained cereal residues facilitates...