Integrated evaluation of changes in agriculture in view of climate, biodiversity and water goals

Agricultural practices are causing a diverse variety of environmental impacts such as airborne emissions of ammonia and greenhouse gases and leaching and runoff of nutrients to ground water and surface water. In order to achieve environmental goals related to ground and surface water (nutrient leaching and runoff), biodiversity (ammonia) and climate (greenhouse gases), a wide set of mitigation measures ranging from changes in feed composition, housing systems, manure application, crop and water management was defined. We evaluated the effects of those measure by using the integrated crop, soil and nutrient management model INITIATOR in view of the various environmental goals.

Agricultural practices are causing a diverse variety of environmental impacts such as (i) emissions of ammonia (NH3) and greenhouse gases (GHG; CO2, CH4 and N2O) from animal housing systems and agricultural soils and (ii) accumulation, leaching and runoff of carbon, nutrients (such as nitrogen, N and phosphorus, P) from agricultural soils to ground water and surface water. In order to achieve the goals related to the Habitats Directive (HD), Nitrates Directive (ND), Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Paris Agreement emission goals are set, amongst others, for NH3 emissions, N leaching and runoff and GHG emissions. We constructed a wide set of measures ranging from changes in feed composition, housing type, manure application, crop, soil and water management. We evaluated the effects of those measure by using the integrated crop, soil and nutrient management model INITIATOR (Kros et al., 2013) and checked whether a reduction of the extent of the agriculture sector is needed on top of the mitigation measure in other to achieve the environmental goals.