Research

The project contributes to the Mission Soil health implementation by creating five Living Labs across Europe that aim to implement novel solutions inspired by conservation and regenerative agriculture to mitigate the current threats to European Soils, in particular loss of organic matter, biodiversity and structure degradation. Based on a co-creation process, Living Labs will integrate relevant stakeholders around a number a lighthouse farms where novel solutions are implemented and monitored based on scientific data.

The aim of this project is to evaluate whether conservation agriculture can increase soil health compared to conventional agriculture while maintaining the same yield level and stability, or whether there are trade-offs between these effect sizes. A field experiment established at UFT Tulln in 2015 is used for this purpose. The following two systems are compared: (i) a system with local conventional crop rotation (sugar beet-winter wheat-maize-winter wheat) and turning tillage and (ii) a conservation system with an eight-crop rotation (sugar beet-winter wheat-maize-soybean-winter wheat-sunflower-winter legume-winter wheat), reduced tillage and extended intercropping. The trial will be in its ninth harvest year in 2023; system effects can therefore be expected in the meantime. The following soil health parameters will be evaluated at two soil depths: (i) total soil carbon and nitrogen pools, (ii) microbial biomass, (iii) available organic carbon and nitrogen, (iv) nitrogen mineralization potential, (v) potential enzyme activity and (vi) aggregate stability. In addition, the two systems are evaluated with regard to their humus balance and nitrogen use efficiency. Furthermore, yield data for all crops over the entire trial period can be used; this allows a pairwise comparison of the yields of sugar beet, winter wheat and maize, which are grown in both systems after the same previous crops.

As part of the Green Deal, agriculture faces the challenge of climate neutrality by reducing emissions and sequestering carbon in soils. Within the EU Soil Strategy ecosystem functions of healthy soils contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation should be achieved. However, currently there are hardly any realistic implementation strategies for these goals within crop production. As a new approach, the EU “Mission Soil Health” defines lighthouse farms as innovation drivers for achieving the climate and soil goals of the Green Deal. In the project SoilPioneers 2050, a national network of lighthouse farms is being set up at 60 locations, covering the most important soil and climate types as well as farming types in Austria. Modern scientific instruments are established on-farm to specifically monitor the soil functions of climate protection, nutrient efficiency, erosion protection and climate change adaptation. The potential for optimizing soil health through regenerative and agroecological practices compared to current agricultural state-of-the art systems, particularly with regard to efficient carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, is recorded through comprehensive soil indicator assessment. Based on the measured indicators, a soil quality model is developed that quantifies the management advance achieved for the individual soil functions and supports the farmers in further management optimization. A new platform will be used to process satellite data for soil organic matter balancing and assessment of crop resilience to heat/drought stress. By integrating crop-based remote sensing data into the soil quality model, the soil function assessment is improved and linked to progress made in climate change adaptation of crop production within the lighthouse farm network. Based on the improvements recorded in soil organic matter formation, nutrient and water efficiency as well as crop resilience achieved by the lighthouse farms, new simulation models will be used to develop improved estimates of climate and soil protection potentials through management innovation in arable farming within the framework of the Green Deal goals and future climate scenarios. By integrating innovative agricultural practice and research in a lighthouse farmer network, the project offers practical management solutions for the national implementation of the Green Deal goals, thereby also providing an important Europe-wide exemple for future-oriented climate action in agriculture.