Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Deriving and Quantifying Current Activities
A current activity (CA) is an agricultural activity currently in use on farms.
The biophysical assessment of these activities requires detailed information on the
implements used in field operations and timing of all field operations to produce a
product. This detailed management information cannot be extracted from aggre-
gated databases such as FADN. In order to collect those data on current activities,
two computer-based surveys were developed at different levels of detail.
Detailed Survey
A detailed survey includes detailed agronomic information on crop rotations and
the field operations of each crop (Zander et al.
2009)
. This survey is completed by
local experts with several years of experience in crop cultivation and knowledge
about current agricultural practices. In order to limit the possible rotations, the
number of potential crops in the survey is reduced on the basis of the crop distribution
information in the FADN.
The survey's Graphical User Interface gives direct access to three windows
containing all data entered:
(i) The crop rotations;
(ii) The ield operations from tillage to harvest and their timing per crop; and
(iii) The resources related to ield operations, differentiated per type of soil and climate.
Crops, field operations and resources have to be selected from predefined lists.
The crop is defined by the botanical name, the growing period, the plant part used, the
product quality aimed at and the production orientation (conventional or organic).
Different intended usage and growing procedures for botanically the same plant
species can be classified in a consistent way. For crop management, we tried to
reduce complexity by identifying 70 different field operations which, in the case of
seed and harvest, can have different economic and technical characteristics (e.g.
harvest of sugar beet or cereals). In the case of fertilizers and pesticides, the survey
offers no brand choice but the possibility to choose a certain type of fertilizer or
pesticide - in the latter case only types of treatment are available (e.g. post
emergence treatment of grass weeds in rape). The survey is designed to obtain the
most complete information set on agricultural activities with a minimum effort.
The tool includes a semi-automatic cost calculation procedure, which requires
some economic information like machinery costs.
Simple Survey
The detailed survey requires a detailed knowledge about crop production, which
is not easily accessible in a large number of regions. Consequently, a less demanding
survey, e.g. Simple Survey was developed and implemented in a larger sample of
