Application of soil health and quality indicators for sustainable and efficient management of sunflowers in Aragon, Castile Leon, Castile La Mancha, Extremadura and Andalusia
- Type Grupo operativo
- Status In progress
- Execution 2022 -2025
- Assigned Budget 533.449,65 €
- Scope Supraautonómico
- Autonomous community Andalucía; Aragón; Castilla y León; Castilla - La Mancha; Extremadura; Madrid, Comunidad de; Murcia, Región de
- Main source of financing PEPAC 2014-2020
- Project website https://saludgirasol.es
The Sunflower Task Force seeks to make a crop of interest profitable from a production point of view, and to stop it from being residual and aimed only at marginal areas. Profitability will be sought, along with sustainability and ecosystem benefits.
The Group will provide a set of parameters capable of identifying the quality and health of soils that support sunflower cultivation; these indicators will be constructed from physical, chemical and biological properties, and will be defined in a way that is simple and quick to measure. The indicators of soil quality and health in sunflower cultivation will provide useful information for managing soil fertility and crop management, with special emphasis on direct sowing, crop rotation and conservation agriculture.
This will enable crops to be shifted towards sustainable, intelligent agricultural systems that are adapted to climate change and will help farmers to comply with the eco-schemes of the new CAP.
The Task Force will generate a Guide for the Sustainability of Sunflower Cultivation and will carry out aspects related to the dissemination and appropriate transfer of results to the entire sector.
- Characterization of Spanish agrosystems based on sunflower cultivation.
- Analysis of agricultural practices that combine profitability (and oil quality) and improvement in soil quality and health.
- Define the most relevant conditions for the management of sunflower crops that improve nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) and increase soil carbon capture.
- Establish simple and robust soil indicators that allow the evaluation of the evolution of soil quality.
- Establishment of a guide for nitrogen fertilization (with organic or mineral sources) of sunflowers that promotes the improvement of NUE and a guide to good practices for sunflower cultivation.
- Select “showcase” plots where the proposed soil indicators and agricultural practices can be applied.
- Dissemination and transfer of the tools generated in the project.
- Asociación agraria de jóvenes agricultores (ASAJA)
- Fertinagro Biotech S.L.
- Centro de edafología y biología aplicada del Segura y Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CEBAS-CSIC)
- Asociación agraria de jóvenes agricultores (ASAJA)
- Fertinagro Biotech S.L.
- Centro de edafología y biología aplicada del Segura y Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CEBAS-CSIC)
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)
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