Conveners
Agro-ecological transitions at the landscape and territorial levels (assessments): carbon cycle
- Elisa Marraccini
- Juan Nieto Cantero
Context description and research question: An increasing number of farmers are considering the impact of conservation practices on soil health to guide sustainable management of vineyards. Understanding impacts of soil management on soil organic carbon (SOC) is one lever for adoption of agroecological practice with potential to help maintain or improve soil health while building SOC stocks to...
Introduction
Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture is crucial in combating climate change, as this sector contributes significantly to overall anthropogenic GHG emissions. In crop production major emissions, stem from the production of Nitrogen (N) fertilizer and related nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions in the field. The broader integration of legumes in crop rotations can...
Introduction
Cultivating cover crops is considered one of the most promising practices for agricultural soil carbon sequestration (Kaye and Quemada 2017). However, biophysical estimates of the potential for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by cover crops have been critiqued as unrealistic (Moinet et al., 2023). This is due to the omission of agronomic and socioeconomic...
- Introduction
Providing solutions to facilitate agro-ecological, dietary and energetic transitions is a way to limit consequences of the climate change. Due to their ability to fix nitrogen in the soil and their nutritional qualities, pulses are crops that can contribute to these transitions. However, the poor varietal offer in pulses is an obstacle to increase their cultivation, especially...
Introduction
In Europe and the UK, farms have typically become highly specialised with little or no integration between crops and livestock enterprises either between or within farms, resulting in an agricultural system that is highly dependent on purchased inputs for the supply of nutrients to both crops and livestock. The consequence of this specialisation has meant there is a risk of soil...
