Soil care
SOILCARE: Soil care for profitable and sustainable crop production (2015-2020)
Client: H2020
SOILCARE is a research project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme. The project has been awarded under the topic “SFS-2B-2015: Assessing soil-improving cropping systems”. The loss of soil fertility and the consequent massive use of expensive external nutrient inputs, notably nitrogen and phosphorous, is one of the difficulties of European crop production to remain competitive in the global market. Therefore, more sustainable crop management strategies are needed to maintain or increase soil fertility. Inappropriate soil and water management and the overuse of external inputs in intensive crop production systems represent an economic loss for the farmer and a significant burden for the environment and can have a subsequent impact on human health.
SOILCARE addresses this by assessing various soil-improving cropping systems in terms of the required external inputs, profitability and environmental impacts. SOILCARE will test the soil-improving cropping systems on 16 study sites spread across Europe. Milieu is leading Work Package 7 (WP7), which aims to select policy options, instruments and practices that can facilitate the adoption of soil-improving techniques at EU level, Member State level and site level. The deliverables of WP7 are:
- Inventory of opportunities and bottlenecks in policy to facilitate the adoption of soil-improving techniques
- Report on the selection of good policy alternatives at EU and study site level accompanied by an analysis of their performance on multiple criteria
- Policy briefings translating the scientific evidence to a policy audience advertising on the potential of soil-improving cropping techniques for a smarter and more sustainable agriculture
