Designing a new cropping system – First workshop held in Birmingham in January 2013

The workshop was held  in Birmingham, UK and followed by the second TILMAN-ORG project meeting, which was organized in conjunction with the UK Organic Producers Conference.

The workshop was part of the work package 6 of the TILMAN-ORG project (Design of sustainable conservation agriculture systems by use of knowledge-based assessment).

The main objectives of the workshop were:

1. to present the results of the European survey on famers’ motivations and problems when applying no tillage and green manures, and
2. to design prototypes of new conservation cropping systems in organic farming, being inspired by these survey results.

Joséphine Peigné and Marion Casagrande from ISARA Lyon facilitated the workshop. Twelve partners joined the workshop: Geert-Jan van der Burgt from the Louis Bolk Institute (LBI, The Netherlands), Kate Gascoyne, Julia Cooper and Marcin Baranski from Newcastle University(UK), Jo Smith from the Organic Research Centre (ORC) , Andreas Surboek from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Austria (FiBL AT), Paul Mäder from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Switzerland, José Blanco and F. Xavier Sans from the University of Barcelona (UB, Spain), Berit Tein and Endla Reintam from the Estonian Life Science University , and Wijnand Sukkel from Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR), The Netherlands.

After defining collectively a set of objectives, three groups of researchers designed three  prototypes of cropping systems. The next step is to assess the designed prototypes with a multi-criteria method. The results of the assessment step will be presented in a second workshop.

More information

Contact

Joséphine Peigné, ISARA, Lyon, France

Link

TILMAN-ORG.net: Design of sustainable conservation agriculture systems by use of knowledge-based assessment