Helping farmers make smart decisions
In Europe, 70 different decision support systems (DSS) for crop protection have been identified. Scientists from the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in Denmark and from similar institutions in several other European countries have just completed a survey on opportunities and limitations of these systems.
Within crop protection, decision support systems may be important tools to farmers.. Scientists are working on developing a unified European decision support system that uses the best traits from a variety of 70 systems they have surveyed. Photo: Janne Hansen
Farming can be a difficult and complex job and farmers juggle innumerable factors in their decision-making. Decision support systems (DSS) are designed to alleviate some of the stress, making it easier to judge when serious attacks are present, and with what to treat crops to achieve a profitable harvest, and hold out the prospect of significantly reducing pesticide use.
Under the auspices of the EU-project ENDURE, a research team has just completed a mammoth survey of the DSS available in Europe, with the long-term aim of constructing new and unified DSS for use across the continent.
The survey discovered a rich variety of driving forces, crops, pests and conceptual ideas behind DSS. In the perspective of reducing dependency and/or use of pesticides, ’best parts’ of DSS were identified within four groups:
Diseases in horticultural crops (18 DSS)
Diseases in arable crops (37 DSS)
Pests (18 DSS)
Weeds (9 DSS)
These ’best parts’ constitute a possible starting point for building new DSS concepts which efficiently utilise previous experiences and which have been unified on a European level.
Helping the farmer
The leader of the team is academic employee Per Rydahl from the Department of Integrated Pest Management at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Aarhus University, and he explains how decision support systems help farmers.
- A common idea behind many DSS is to exploit the facts that different weeds, pests and diseases are not homogeneously distributed in time and space, that they need to be controlled on different levels in different cropping systems and that they have different susceptibilities to different control measures under different conditions. In this context, opportunities exist to reduce the use of pesticides by a more targeted use of pesticides. DSS are mainly constructed to help farmers in their work of identifying, monitoring and controlling weeds, pests and diseases.
- DSS can support various decisions on a farm level, for example strategic decisions before a growing season or tactical decisions during a growing season. Furthermore, DSS can function as learning tools by disseminating knowledge on these interactions.
The survey was conducted in a collaboration of 12 researchers and advisors from eight European countries, and included 70 European crop protection DSS. The DSS were analysed for various characteristics with a special focus on usefulness in reducing the dependency and/or use of pesticides, as compared to relevant alternatives.
In specific crop x pest systems, decision support systems have demonstrated potentials of reducing pesticide inputs by up to 40-50% when compared to existing ’best practices.
The uptake of DSS is generally relatively weak, varying from a few enthusiasts up to just 3% of the number of professional farmers in a single country.
- A general obstacle for a more efficient implementation of DSS in many cropping systems is that regional advisors often recommend ’best practice’ solutions, which are considered to be robust and relatively cheap. Another obstacle is that DSS often require the implementation of new work procedures at the farm level, for example routine field inspections and the consultation of IT tools, says Per Rydahl.
Unified system in Europe
Knowledge of the ’best parts’ of DSS found in the survey can be used as an inspiration for new strategies for pest management on regional levels and for initiating new collaborations on selected DSS concepts at the cross-border and regional levels.
- Probably more important, however, the survey was jointly planned and conducted by researchers and two advisers, who are all involved in national programmes for DSS development. Therefore, the survey constitutes a scientifically and, to some extent also politically, negotiated reference on the ’best parts’ with the perspective of building new DSS concepts, to be unified on a European level, and which focus on reducing the dependency and/or use of pesticides in existing cropping systems, says Per Rydahl.
Work has now been initiated to construct new DSS concepts, which are unified on a European level and which integrate selected ’best parts’ in the following selected crop x pest systems:
Diseases in potato
Codling moth in pome fruit
Weeds in maize
Over the coming 18 months, efforts will be made to construct relatively simple but operational DSS within each of these three crop x pest systems.
- Of course, much additional work is required to make these DSS operational for more crop x pest systems and for various geographical conditions. Consequently, an important result of the activities in ENDURE regarding DSS will be a prioritised list of future activities needed to construct, validate and implement DSS for crop protection on a wider scale in Europe, says Per Rydahl.
See the full story and read more about ENDURE at www.endure-network.eu
