Augen auf beim Dünger

Ein Landwirt in der Westschweiz hat kürzlich festgestellt, dass ein Dünger, den er gekauft hatte, Fremdkörper wie Kunststoffe, Aluminium und Schnüre enthielt. Er meldete dies seinem Lieferanten und dem FiBL

Specific interactions leading to transgressive overyielding in cover crop mixtures

Growing mixtures of species instead of sole crops is expected to increase the ecosystem services provided by cover crops. This study aimed at understanding the interactions between species and investigating how they affect the performance of the mixture. Four species were combined in six bispecific mixtures in a field experiment. The performance of each species when grown in a mixture was compared to its performance as a sole crop at different sowing densities, to characterise the influence of intra- and interspecific competition for each species. Intra- and interspecific competition coefficients were quantified using a response surface design and the hyperbolic yield-density equation. Interactions between the four species ranged from facilitation to competition. Most of the mixtures exhibited transgressive overyielding. Without nitrogen (N) fertilisation, high complementarity between species allowed to achieve the highest biomass. With N fertilisation, high dominance of one mixture component should be avoided to achieve good performance. A revised approach in the use of the land equivalent ratio for the evaluation of cover crop mixtures is also proposed in this study. It allows to better identify transgressive overyielding in mixtures and to better characterise the effect of one species on the other within the mixture

Kriterien zur Stickstoffeffizienz moderner Winterweizensorten und deren Eignung für low-input Anbausysteme

Nitrogen deficiency is one of the most important reasons for reduced quality and yield stability in wheat production under low-input conditions. The present project intends to develop criteria allowing to find varieties that are adapted for low-input agricultural conditions. Therefore, yield and nitrogen uptake and use dynamics of eleven modern wheat varieties have been studied under low and high input conditions on a long term field experiment in Changins. This preliminary report shows that nitrogen efficiency defined as yield per available nitrogen is a useful criterion to distinguish nutrient efficiency under high nitrogen conditons but not when nitrogen is lacking. In further studies we will focus on backing quality as a potential indicator for nitrogen efficiency at low nitrogen conditions

Integrating simulation data from a crop model in the development of an agri-environmental indicator for soil cover in Switzerland

Agriculture generates important impacts on the environment, which can be evaluated with agri-environmental indicators. A key element of environment protection in agriculture is the maintenance of a dense soil cover for the longest possible period. Notably, soil cover is known to diminish erosion risks and nitrate leaching. In this study, an agri-environmental indicator for soil cover is presented, which integrates data from the crop model STICS to quantify vegetation growth dynamics. Simulations were conducted with STICS for the major crops cultivated in Switzerland across several contrasting pedoclimatic situations. They were then integrated with data for crop residue cover to evaluate soil cover at the field and farm levels in the framework of a farm network survey. At the field level, for the period from the harvest of the previous crop through the harvest of the main crop, the highest soil cover was achieved by silage maize and winter barley. A high variability between fields was observed, due to the diversity of cultural practices during the period preceding the seeding of the main crops. Some crops, winter wheat in particular, showed a high number of days with insufficient soil cover (under 30%), leading to potential environmental risks. This shows the crucial need of promoting conservation agriculture principles (permanent soil cover, minimum soil disturbance, diversification of crop rotation) in arable systems to better protect the soils and the environment. The soil cover indicator presented here provided a continuous quantification of soil cover, whereas most of the currently used indicators provide qualitative or roughly quantitative results

Comparison of visual assessment and digital image analysis for canopy cover estimation

Nowadays, in the context of agriculture, cover crops are crops cultivated with the sole aim of providing important ecosystem services such as erosion prevention. Many services offered by these crops are directly linked to the development of their vegetation, and especially of canopy cover. A proper estimation of this cover is thus necessary to evaluate cover crop performance. Many methods to estimate canopy cover exist, but differ in terms of effort and time needed to implement them. In this study, we compared visual assessment of canopy cover in the field with two methods of digital image analysis (Assess and Canopeo), for different cover crop species and vegetation types. Visual estimation was positively correlated with both type of image analysis estimations. However, it showed systematically lower values of canopy cover, especially at intermediate canopy cover values. The type of vegetation influenced the visual and digital image estimations, narrow leaf species being the most difficult to evaluate visually. This study showed that depending on its utilisation, visual canopy cover assessment could be useful, especially when only relative estimation of canopy cover is needed. When absolute canopy cover estimation is needed, the use of digital image analysis should be preferred

ON THE STABILITY OF TYPE I BLOW UP FOR THE ENERGY SUPER CRITICAL HEAT EQUATION

We consider the energy super critical semilinear heat equation ∂tu = ∆u + u p , x ∈ R 3 , p > 5. We first revisit the construction of radially symmetric self similar solutions performed through an ode approach in [51], [2], and propose a bifurcation type argument suggested in [3] which allows for a sharp control of the spectrum of the corresponding linearized operator in suitable weighted spaces. We then show how the sole knowledge of this spectral gap in weighted spaces implies the finite codimensional non radial stability of these solutions for smooth well localized initial data using energy bounds. The whole scheme draws a route map for the derivation of the existence and stability of self similar blow up in non radial energy super critical settings