Family Farming Knowledge Platform

EIP-AGRI Focus Group Digital tools for sustainable nutrient management

The Farm to Fork strategy under the European Green Deal identifies the excess of nutrients in the environment as a major source of air, soil and water pollution, negatively impacting biodiversity and climate. The European Commission aims to reduce nutrient losses by at least 50%, while ensuring there is no deterioration in soil fertility. This will reduce the use of fertilisers by at least 20% by 2030. Gross nitrogen balance is an important indicator for the quantified Green Deal target. Improved nutrient management as part of more sustainable farming systems is included in the green architecture of the new Common Agriculture Policy 2023-27 (CAP), contributing to several specific objectives of the policy. In particular, the new CAP Regulation1 introduces the Farm Sustainability Tool for Nutrient Management (FaST) referring to digital application(s) that provide on-farm decision support on plant nutrition management, with focus on nitrogen and phosphate. The tool(s) will provide information on nutrient balance and soil at field scale, as well as relevant Integrated Administration and Control System data and legal requirements on nutrients. Besides the FaST tool, several other options are available to farmers and advisors to assist decisions on sustainable nutrient management, based on different technologies, developed in research projects or by private companies. These developments provide an opportunity to speed up farmers’ uptake of digital solutions going beyond the sphere of nutrient management, adding and connecting to other potential functionalities. Despite the fact that these tools are based on advanced algorithms and methodology, using diverse sources of data and providing better decision support to farmers, the adoption rate is still low.

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Publisher: EIP-AGRI
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Author: EIP-AGRI
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Organization: EIP-AGRI
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Year: 2022
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Type: Report
Content language: English
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