Inspection system for in use pesticide application equiupment in Greece. First three years of application

According to Directive 2009/128/EC, all member states should have inspected all in-use Pesticide Application Equipment (PAE) by November 2016. In Greece, Law 4036/2012 embodied the provisions of this Directive into Greek legislation, but unfortunately due to various reasons, the inspections were significantly delayed. Aim of the current study is to briefly present the inspection system of in-use PAE that was developed due to the aforementioned law and then provide the statistical results of the inspections until February 2018. The progress of the last two years was significant, but a lot of work remains to make the inspection system functional and unproblematic.According to Directive 2009/128/EC, all member states should have inspected all in-use Pesticide Application Equipment (PAE) by November 2016. In Greece, Law 4036/2012 embodied the provisions of this Directive into Greek legislation, but unfortunately due to various reasons, the inspections were significantly delayed. Aim of the current study is to briefly present the inspection system of in-use PAE that was developed due to the aforementioned law and then provide the statistical results of the inspections until February 2018. The progress of the last two years was significant, but a lot of work remains to make the inspection system functional and unproblematic

Exploring the adoption of precision agricultural technologies: a cross regional study of EU farmers

Precision agricultural technologies (PATs) allow more detailed management of in-field variability. Policy and advisory communities have championed PATs as a route to preserving natural capital whilst increasing productivity from agricultural land. A range of PATs are currently available for the agricultural producer but uptake varies by the type of technology and region. Whereas most studies on uptake have focused on US or Australia we empirically examine uptake of machine guidance (MG) and variable rate nitrogen technologies (VRNT) within European farming systems. Using primary information from 971 arable crop growers across five countries: Belgium, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK, a multilevel random intercept regression estimated a) the differences between adoption and non-adoption and b) the differences between VRNT and MG adoption. We find, aside from size and income differences, which reflect the economic cost barrier to adoption, an attitudinal difference, in terms of optimism towards the technology's economic return leading to more probability of uptake. Moreover innovative and information seeking behaviour also proved significant when upgrading from machine guidance to variable rate technologies. Subsidy and taxation were considered positive drivers of uptake within the community. However, results suggest that more indirect interventions, such as informational support to counteract industry bias, and demonstration to prove the viability of economic return may be effective at meeting land manager and policy expectations towards PATs

Economic and environmental analysis of energy efficiency measures in agriculture. Case Studies and trade offs.

This report is the result of the collaboration of the partners of the AGREE work-package “Economic and environmental analysis”, which is based on case study analyses of the partners in seven countries of the EU. The case studies show economic and environmental trade-offs in the different regions in the EU, for which each partner is responsible. Nevertheless prior to the reporting of the case studies an intensive discussion on a common methodological approach has been accomplished and applied to the case studies. The case studies show a wide range of different perspectives of energy efficiency in agriculture, but they are all based on the common methodology presented in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, the case studies are presented, with authors indicated at the beginning of each section. Each section of Chapter 4 ends with a synthesis analysis of the results from the different case studies. Chapter 5 summarizes and concludes the report by highlighting the major findings of the analyses. The report builds upon the “State of the Art in Energy Efficiency in Europe” published separately by the AGREE consortium (Gołaszewski et al. 2012), which shows the status quo of energy use and possible energy efficiency measures in agriculture across different production systems and regions in Europe. This report presents an economic and environmental analysis based on in-depth case studies which show the potential for, and constraints on, energy efficiency measures in agriculture with respect to the specific environments in Europe

Cost-based domain filtering for stochastic constraint programming

Cost-based filtering is a novel approach that combines techniques from Operations Research and Constraint Programming to filter from decision variable domains values that do not lead to better solutions [7]. Stochastic Constraint Programming is a framework for modeling combinatorial optimization problems that involve uncertainty [9]. In this work, we show how to perform cost-based filtering for certain classes of stochastic constraint programs. Our approach is based on a set of known inequalities borrowed from Stochastic Programming ¿ a branch of OR concerned with modeling and solving problems involving uncertainty. We discuss bound generation and cost-based domain filtering procedures for a well-known problem in the Stochastic Programming literature, the static stochastic knapsack problem. We also apply our technique to a stochastic sequencing problem. Our results clearly show the value of the proposed approach over a pure scenario-based Stochastic Constraint Programming formulation both in terms of explored nodes and run time

Energy efficiency in Agriculture – Opportunities, Constraints and Research needs

Agriculture as a primary industry relies on energy use to a great extent. With the depletion of fossil resources, increased energy prices will have a dramatic effect on the competitiveness of agricultural production systems and energy efficiency will have a great impact on the comparative cost advantages of agricultural production systems. Within a Coordination and Support Action funded by the 7th research framework of the EU (www.agree.aua.gr) a consortium from seven European countries identified opportunities, constraints and research needs concerning energy efficiency in agriculture

Which factors and incentives influence the intention to adopt precision agricultural technologies?

Precision agricultural technologies (PAT) promise an approach to agricultural production whichboth enhances productivity and minimises environmental herm. Despite promising economic gains from PAT, uptake within Europe is currently low. We explore the factors behind adoption and non-adoption of PAT using a survey of 971 European farmers, focusing on the role of incentives influencing adoption. We examine current non-adopters' intentions for uptake PAT and current adopters intentions to uptake more PAT. We augment past behavioural models applied to PAT uptake by examining the effect of financial and non-financial incentives and attitudes towards payoffs of the technology. We apply a zero-inflated Poisson regression. Results indicate that non-adopters are distinct from adopters and more favourable to financial and non-financial incentives, whereas adopters support incentives around only a limited set of incentives. Attitudinal differences towards certainty of outcome and belief in the payback also emerge between these two groups. These are further explored qualitatively. The results indicate that a gradient of adoption is occurring with specific groups of farmers identifying particular needs but also responding to differing incentives. Recognition of these differences at policy level could lead to cost-effective interventions which maximise uptake, generate returns to farmers and meet policy desires for sustainable agricultural production. Acknowledgement

Agenda for transnational co-operation on energy efficiency in agriculture.

This report describes the stakeholder process set up by the AGREE project, to produce an Agenda for Transnational Cooperation in R&D on the topic of energy efficiency in agriculture. In six of the partner countries, represting a wide variety of agro-climatic conditions, stakeholders from across the value chain and representing the enabling environment, came together to discuss and identify opportunities and bottlenecks for an energy efficient agriculture for the future. The resulting lists were analysed and clustered to produce nine potential topics for energy efficiency R&D in EU agriculture. In a transnational meeting with representatives from each of the participating countries, as well as from the External Advisory Board, R&D themes were identified and prioritised to produce a list of eleven R&D areas: 1. Sensor technology 2. Agro-residue valorisation 3. Operational groups (energy efficiency networks) 4. Integrative solutions 5. Socio-economic scenarios research 6. Definitions and data exchange 7. Decision Support System (DSS) tools for farmers 8. Design tools 9. Local food strategies 10.Soil and water management 11.Farm machinery In this report the above mentioned areas are explained and described and finally suggestions for the potential embedding of each of the items is discussed