Cover crop and living mulch toolbox

Summary in the original language of the document

The toolbox aims at making scientific literature and technical information on cover crops and living mulches widely available. It furthermore promotes the current knowledge and impact of innovative subsidiary cropping systems and potential solutions to ecological problems. The tool takes the user, being a new or experienced farmer, through a series of questions, helping determine the crop's requirements in relation to geographical region, soil, crop characteristics and use. This will generate a set of plant profiles that fall within the specifications and allow a comparison of the properties of different species. It identifies suitable cover crop and living mulch species and varieties, appropriate species mixtures, provides information on appropriate machinery, on best current practical advice about management issues and includes economic considerations of subsidiary crop based systems for individual farms. The resulting species list contains all species in the database ordered by their relevance to the users’ requirements; i.e. the most relevant species will appear on the top, the least relevant at the end of the list. The data has been collated from published literature, existing databases, and from the OSCAR database.