Fertility Building Management Measures in Organic Cropping Systems (FertilCrop) - archived website

Summary

The overall aim of FertilCrop was to develop efficient and sustainable management techniques aimed at increasing crop productivity in organic farming systems.
To achieve this, the mutual interactions of crop plants with weeds and co-cultivated plants, with soil macro- and micro-organisms in their physically and chemically determined environment influencing C and N pools and fluxes as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were studied. Top soil layers with increased fertility supporting crop growth may result from reduced soil tillage, increased inputs of organic matter, green manures, and animal manures, and often they are found in orchards and vineyards that are tilled only superficially.Work is carried out in 7 work packages.
Twenty field experiments along a South West to North East transect across Europe on fertility inputs such as green manure (10) and animal manure (7), on soil tillage (7) and crop rotations (7), and on whole farming systems (5) provided historical data on crop and soil performance built into a database.
The FertilCrop project was funded by the CORE Organic Plus Funding Bodies being partners of the FP7 ERA-Net project, CORE Organic Plus (www.coreorganic.org).
This website was archived on January 11, 2020 and is no longer updated.