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Content archived on 2024-04-30

INTEGRATED AND ECOLOGICAL VEGETABLE PRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABLE FARMING SYSTEMS FOCUSING ON HIGH QUALITY PRODUCTION AND MINIMUM ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Objective



Objectives
- to develop more sustainable integrated and ecological vegetable farming systems that integrate high.quality production with minimal environmental impact by using a comprehensive coherent and strategic standardised novel methodology called the lprototyping of integrated and ecological farming systems, resulting from an EU concerted action on this topic for arable farming ending in 1996.
- to develop in this framework multi-objective farming methods concerning crop rotation, fertilisation, crop protection and nature and landscape management that enable integration of potentially conflicting objectives like economy and ecology.
- to elaborate novel approaches to pesticide use evaluation and pesticide selection, the quality production of crops, the energy use of off farm inputs and the farm economic perspectives
- to integrate all the elaborated knowledge in comprehensive, coherent farming methods manuals to be used by the farming industry, research, extension and education
- to compare in a comprehensive and standardised way ecological and integrated farming systems.
Description
The farms that produce field grown vegetables are relatively small, mostly concentrated in certain regions (for practical market-oriented reasons) often highly specialised and characterised by the very intensive land use (all year round soil utilisation) and high (extemal) labour demand per hectare. Vegetable growing is facing increasing agronomical, environmental and economical problems. Farmers are currently challenged by consumers and authorities to be the responsible manager of the green space, the rural area while producing high quality (even speciality) products. This affects the full depth and scale of the farm management. Consequently there is an urgent need for new farming systems that are multiobjective and integrate 'new' objectives such as quality of produce and production methods, quality of the abiotic environment, landscape and nature values and agronomic sustainability into the old objectives. Such, integral new farming systems are at the moment represented by two, different, approaches namely integrated and ecological farming. Integrated production under label has been introduced in the recent past for a number of products in a number of European regions and ecological production labels are recently harmonised on the European level. In spite of this, the potential of these systems is much larger than the present practice. In vegetable farming a systematic and standardised evaluation of the potential of both systems is completely lacking as is a comparison based on a standardised set of parameters. This in opposition to arable farming where this type of systematic research is gaining in importance in Europe.
Proposed is to start farming systems research to develop prototypes of integrated and ecological vegetable farming systems in three important vegetable producing regions spread over Europe under different socio/economic, soil and climatic conditions: Netherlands, Emilia-Romagna in Italy and Portugal.
Next to that in Switzerland ecological and integrated pilot farms will be compared and targetedly improved.

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Topic(s)

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Coordinator

STICHTING PROEFSTATION VOOR DE AKKERBOUW EN DE GROENTETEELT IN DE VOLLEGROND
EU contribution
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Address
EDELHERTWEG, 1
8200 AK LELYSTAD
Netherlands

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Total cost

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Participants (3)

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