Farmers can visit a new website created by the European Commission to discover what impact their farm practices can have on the environment.
They can visit the page titled ‘Impacts of farming practices on the environment and the climate’ on the European Commission website to find out the information relating to their practices.
The website was created by the EU Science Hub and EU Agriculture, and displays content gathered from the collection of published scientific evidence on the impacts of farming practices on the environment, climate and agricultural productivity.
The farming practices are included in Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) eco-schemes and agri-environmental climate measures, supported with €78 billion of public funding in 2023-2027.
EU countries can use CAP funds to promote some or all of these practices.
Visitors to the site can find answers to two types of questions:
- Which farming practices are linked to a specific impact?
- What are the impacts of a farming practice?
Visitors to the site can select a farming practice (e.g., pesticide reduction strategies) and within that practice, they can select further specific farming practices (e.g., integrated pest management, low-input systems).
Further examples include, if the website user selects the practice of landscape features, they can then choose from specific farming practices, such as hedgerows, field margins, isolated trees, and ditches and ponds.
If the reader selects field margins from the specific practices, they will be able to view the studies completed that show the farming practices of field margins resulted in the following impacts:
- Decrease nutrient leaching and run-off;
- Decrease pests and diseases;
- Decrease soil erosion;
- Increase crop yield.
Each of these ways can then be expanded upon by the site user, who can read the results of academic studies completed on the farming practices.
Impact of farm practices
The website gives visitors the opportunity to discover ways in which a specific impact can be implemented in various farming practices.
E.g., if the website user wishes to see what practices can increase biodiversity on their farm through farming practices, they include:
- Grassland management;
- Grazing;
- Agroforestry practices;
- Organic farming systems.
For the practice of grassland management, farmers can choose to see how results have shown that to increase soil biological quality, the increase of the grass species richness will have a positive impact.
Data collecting
To show the results on the website, large amounts of data were combined by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) to determine whether farming practices had positive or negative effects on the environment, climate and productivity.
Meta-analyses (MA) were used, which are the results of the combination of several independent individual experiments.
MAs allow the exploration of general trends beyond the dependence on context that large numbers of experimental studies have and can identify key moderating factors in these trends.