Increasing agriculture sustainability in Europe: driving factors for agroforestry implementation

Agroforestry contributes to challenges such as feeding increasing populations, depletion of natural resources and the impact of climate change. This thesis aims at analysing the drivers of the European farmers and foresters for implementing or not agroforestry in their lands, and how the last Common Agricultural Policy affected the promotion of agroforestry in Europe. The major driving forces are tradition in the family or the region, diversification of products and learning from successful experiences. The promotion of the woody component can be appreciated in different sections of the CAP linked to Pillar I and Pillar II, although lack of consistency between Pillars are one of the main drawbacks to adopt agroforestry

Driving forces for agroforestry uptake in Mediterranean Europe: application of the analytic network process

The factors that determine the implementation of four alternative agroforestry practices or no agroforestry on a theoretical 200 ha farm in Mediterranean Europe were examined using an analytic network process (ANP) model. The four agroforestry practices considered were implementation of a form of (i) high natural and cultural value agroforestry, (ii) agroforestry with high value trees, and agroforestry for (iii) arable and (iv) livestock systems. The ANP model was developed in a participatory manner through a systematic series of quantitative questionnaires and workshops with agroforestry researchers. In general, all the Mediterranean agroforestry systems were associated with high benefits and opportunities, but also with high costs and high risks. The greatest benefits were attributed to high natural and cultural value agroforestry systems, which greatly contributed to the highest priority of this system. Overall ranking of priorities for the agroforestry management alternatives show robustness in the sensitivity analysis. The “no agroforestry” land use became the preferred option when costs were given a weighting of 0.50 or greater

Sustainability Assessment of current and recommended methods : TECH4EFFECT project report

The TECH4EFFECT project (http://www.tech4effect.eu/), funded by the "Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program", is an international research collaboration of 20 partners from science and industry. The objective of the project is to enhance efficient wood production, by adapting the management of European forests to the requirements of a modern bioeconomy, and to meet new challenges such as climate change. Data and knowledge- based management will enable more efficient silviculture and harvesting, but also reduction of soil and environmental impact from forest operations with the TECH4EFFECT benchmarking system. Within the Tech4Effect project, the baseline reference of current and most common wood value chain practices in major EU regions (Northern, Central, Southern, Eastern EU) from stand regeneration to timber at road side was defined, building on the processes and supply chains gathered in Work Package (WP)5.This was done in a process-based approach, integrating the silvicultural and operational practices with current volumes of growing stock and fellings, calculating material flows along those wood value chains and quantifying via a set of indicators their environmental, social and economic performance. In a second step, the TECH4EFFECT scenarios of increased wood mobilization (link to WP2) and improved efficiency (link to WP3) was compared against the baseline. The analysis focused on the study cases analysed in WP2, WP3 & WP4, using the Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment ToSIA (Lindner et al., 2010). The analysis of the environmental wood chain performance considered greenhouse gas emissions (consistent with LCA methodology), energy use, and soil impact indicators. Social impacts were studied in terms of employment effects and occupational safety. The economic performance of the alternative wood value chains was analysed with cost-benefit analysis. Indicators as well as data needs for calculating these pan-European indicator values was harmonised in close cooperation with WP5. This deliverable report consists of bottom-up upscaling from work studies and case studies to national level for selected representative countries, as well as top-down assessments at EU level and disaggregated impacts for four regions: Northern EU (NEU), Southern EU (SEU), Eastern EU (EEU) and Central EU (CEU). These impacts have been cross referenced to the Tech4Effect goals: Efficiency goals of 20% reduced production costs, 15% reductions in fuel consumptions, less environmental impacts (soil damage) and 2% increased forest (yield) productivity. These goals are discussed per impact category and technological solution. In addition, digitalisation and biofuels are assessed and discussed as options to mobilise timber at reduced environmental impact

Farmers' reasoning behind the uptake of agroforestry practices: evidence from multiple case-studies across Europe

Potential benefits and costs of agroforestry practices have been analysed by experts, but few studies have captured farmers’ perspectives on why agroforestry might be adopted on a European scale. This study provides answers to this question, through an analysis of 183 farmer interviews in 14 case study systems in eight European countries. The study systems included high natural and cultural value agroforestry systems, silvoarable systems, high value tree systems, and silvopasture systems, as well as systems where no agroforestry practices were occurring. A mixed method approach combining quantitative and qualitative approaches was taken throughout the interviews. Narrative thematic data analysis was performed. Data collection proceeded until no new themes emerged. Within a given case study, i.e. the different systems in different European regions, this sampling was performed both for farmers who practice agroforestry and farmers who did not. Results point to a great diversity of agroforestry practices, although many of the farmers are not aware of the term or concept of agroforestry, despite implementing the practice in their own farms. While only a few farmers mentioned eligibility for direct payments in the CAP as the main reason to remove trees from their land, to avoid the reduction of the funded area, the tradition in the family or the region, learning from others, and increasing the diversification of products play the most important role in adopting or not agroforestry systems

How is agroforestry perceived in Europe? An assessment of positive and negative aspects by stakeholders

Whilst the benefits of agroforestry are widely recognised in tropical latitudes few studies have assessed how agroforestry is perceived in temperate latitudes. This study evaluates how stakeholders and key actors including farmers, landowners, agricultural advisors, researchers and environmentalists perceive the implementation and expansion of agroforestry in Europe. Meetings were held with 30 stakeholder groups covering different agroforestry systems in 2014 in eleven EU countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). In total 344 valid responses were received to a questionnaire where stakeholders were asked to rank the positive and negative aspects of implementing agroforestry in their region. Improved biodiversity and wildlife habitats, animal health and welfare, and landscape aesthetics were seen as the main positive aspects of agroforestry. By contrast, increased labour, complexity of work, management costs and administrative burden were seen as the most important negative aspects. Overall, improving the environmental value of agriculture was seen as the main benefit of agroforestry, whilst management and socio-economic issues were seen as the greatest barriers. The great variability in the opportunities and barriers of the systems suggests enhanced adoption of agroforestry across Europe will be most likely to occur with specific initiatives for each type of system

Agroforestry as a sustainable land use option to reduce wildfires risk in European Mediterranean areas

Wildfires have always been an integral part of the ecology of many terrestrial ecosystems, but their frequency is increasing in many parts of the world. Wildfires were once a natural phenomenon, but after humans learned to control fire, it has been used as a management tool to increase soil fertility, to regenerate natural vegetation for grazing and to control competing vegetation. However, currently uncontrolled wildfires threaten not only natural vegetation, landscape biodiversity, communities and economies, but they also release large amounts of carbon dioxide, thus contributing to global temperature increase. Higher temperatures and drier summers have increased the risk of wildfires in biodiversity rich areas of European Mediterranean countries and have resulted in human casualties. The aim of this article is to investigate whether agroforestry, the practice of integrating woody vegetation and agricultural crops and/or livestock, could be a management tool to reduce wildfires in European Mediterranean countries. Fire events from 2008 to 2017 and data of land cover and land use were spatially correlated. Results indicated that agroforestry areas had fewer wildfire incidents than forests, shrublands or grasslands, providing evidence of the potential of agroforestry to reduce fire risk and protect ecosystems

Incorporating ecosystem services in evaluating the sustainability of innovative organic farming systems using the Public Goods tool

In earlier studies, a tool was developed to assess the sustainability of farming systems – the Public Goods Tool (PG-tool). This tool was developed predominantly for use in food farming and in the current study it will be adapted for innovative examples in organic farming. To achieve this, new indicators were identified in addition to those already in the PG-Tool. Special attention was given to incorporating indicators which could capture provisioning of ecosystem services by farming systems, in particular those with a focus on biodiversity, human nutrition and social well-being - areas that are also currently underrepresented in the PG Tool

Alley cropping diversifies your farm and improves the environment

The factsheet describes the benefits of alley cropping and identifies the species that can be used in Finland

Improving access to research outcomes for innovation in agriculture and forestry: the VALERIE project

Many excellent results are obtained in agricultural and forestry research projects. but their practical adoption is often limited. The aim of the European project VALERIE is to increase the transfer and application of innovations produced by research in agriculture and forestry, by facilitating their integration into management practices. The project is still ongoing and the results illustrated in this paper are still temporary and subject to being improved. Here we present the methodology used in VALF,RIE to extract and summarise knowledge for innovation from research documents with the aim of making it available to final users through ask-Valerie.en; we also report on current progress. The tasks associated with extracting and summarising knowledge are centred on: i) an ontology; ii) a document base; and iii) a system (ask-Valerie.eu) that allows users to effectively search the document base. An ontology defines a set of concepts and the relations between them. The VALERIE ontology is built by experts in the agricultural and forestry domain and contains 6169 concepts (21st October 2016). The document base is the collection of documents in which the system searches. The VALERIE document base includes scientific and practical documents derived from various sources, Written in any of a number of languages. All documents contained in the document base are annotated using the ontology: each term (a word or a short phrase) in the document that matches a concept in the VALERIE-ontology is linked to that concept. Annotation is an automated process that takes place whenever a document is added to the document base. The document base contains 4278 documents (October 2016). Among them, there are 201 minifactsheets written by members of the VALERIE project, each describing an innovation with: a short description of the innovation, a list of correlated projects, and some links to scientific and practical documents. ask-Valerie.eu searches documents and fragments of text from the document base that address the user's query. ask-Vaterie.cu mimics the dialogue between a practitioner and an expert and achieves this functionality by: i) supporting the practitioner in articulating the question (it completes terms that the user starts to type and suggests other possibly relevant terms); ii) expanding the query using synonyms; iii) extracting and ranking text fragments from the documents