Development of sustainable and resilient food and farming systems requires practical solutions and innovations that help farmers to improve and optimize the management considering different sustainability impacts. Farmers acutely need tools that support them to diversify their cropping systems and to improve nitrogen management. Adoption of new crops and cultivars with different requirements and the changing climatic conditions with increased frequency of various extreme conditions causes new challenges in crop management for farmers. Different digital and precision farming tools can help the adoption of new crops and managing the weather variability. Currently many farmers rely solely on remote vegetation (e.g. NDVI) sensing for variable rate nitrogen application without considering the underlying cause of the yield variability. Incorporating knowledge of soil properties, water conditions and carryover nitrogen from previous years can significantly enhance understanding on the underlying reasons of the yield responses of crops and improve the decision making. Additionally, farmers need to be able to analyze the yield amount and quality as responses to management to improve their practices.
Currently there is shortage of easy-to-use tools for on-farm use. This project aims to 1) support farmers with tools for diversifying the farming systems with improved crop rotations and smart use of cover crops 2) develop improved nitrogen and soil property maps to support variable rate application decisions 3) Improve the accuracy of variable rate nitrogen application by developing machine specific application maps 4) Develop analysis tools for farmers to analyze the effect of their management decisions over time.
The project has three work packages focusing on planning, control, and analysis of crop production. WP1 Supporting diversification of farming systems will further develop planning tools which provide farmers with recommended crop rotations based on satellite derived precrop values based on field characteristics and will study the effect of legumes in rotation and use of cover crops in fields managed with site specific nitrogen management. WP2 Precision nitrogen management will focus on development of improved variable rate decisions based on multisource information (e.g. soil maps, yield forecasts, soil nitrogen maps) and machine specific application maps taking the field topology into account. WP3 will focus on developing of analysis tools for farms enabling the analysis between planned and implemented management depending on the used equipment and the analysis of the success of within field distribution of nitrogen and other inputs. The project will make use of high precision data and sensor systems from research farms as well national data sources.
The project will produce several software tools and knowledge to support diversification and improved precision management which will directly benefit farmers. The consortium combines expertise in crop science, engineering, crop modeling and data processing to combine agronomically relevant management for improved real-time control of fertilizer spreaders. This combination is expected to achieve significant improvements in nitrogen use efficiency.
