Institut für Strategien und Folgenabschätzung
On the way to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in agriculture, great potential is attributed to the storage of carbon in the soil. In fact, the proportion of carbon stored in German farmland has steadily decreased over the past few years. One reason for this is, among other things, an increasingly one-sided crop rotation system. In order to be able to better exploit the potential of carbon storage without sacrificing crop productivity, it is crucial to identify site-optimized crop rotations, taking into account local soil and climate conditions, cultivation systems and tillage practices. The crop rotations must be improved in their overall climate balance, i.e. taking into account the cultivation-specific GHG emissions from seed, fertilizer, diesel consumption and nitrous oxide emissions, and at the same time food security must be guaranteed. The KlimaFfolgen project will carry out a Germany-wide potential analysis of the contribution of improved crop rotation to carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. A field-specific decision support system (EUS) for crop rotation design is to be developed and made available to agricultural practice on the basis of satellite-supported land use information, process-based soil and plant modeling and coupled GHG balancing.
Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
