Abstract
A method is introduced to predict the scale effects of environmental legislation on major UK conventional and organic crop rotations. The paper attempts to extract the key crops and vegetable crop rotations (both conventional and organic farming) in all different UK regions. It highlights the conventional and organic concentration of UK field scale vegetable cropping. With this information representative crop rotations for different regions and soil types can be created and used e.g. in a recently developed integrated plant-soil-environment-economics model (EU-Rotate_N). This model is designed as a decision support system to optimise rotations on various decision-making levels. The levels considered are: farm or rotational level, catchment, regional and national level. By comparing different farming systems their strength and weaknesses in delivering environmental and economic sustainability can be assessed on various scales.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 19-27 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Aspects of Applied Biology |
| Volume | 80 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2006 |
Bibliographical note
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Keywords
- vegetable crops
- crop rotation
- regional distribution
- Leaching
- nitrate leaching
- NVZ
- Water framework directive
- scale effects
- Computer modelling