NUTRI-CHECK NET: A Europe-wide network for optimising crop nutrition
Encouraging the widespread adoption of effective crop nutrient management practices
Arable farms across Europe face the huge and urgent challenge of increasing crop productivity whilst reducing use of synthetic fertilisers and nutrient losses. From January 1, 2023, to December 31, ADAS led a project to establish a new network for European farmers called NUTRI-CHECK NET. Its aim was to encourage farm-level adoption of the most effective crop nutrient management practices. Widespread adoption of ‘measure-to-manage’ or ‘check-to-change’ approaches to crop nutrition enhanced nutrient recycling and crop productivity and reduced synthetic fertiliser use and nutrient losses.
Decision-systems and nutrition tools (including commercial products, services, and recent research outputs) were assembled by national experts from across Europe, including leading farmers, into a common online NUTRI-CHECK NET platform.
Dr Sarah Kendall, ADAS Crop Physiologist, the lead for this collaborative project, highlights that:
Crop nutrition clubs
Across nine countries, Crop Nutrition Clubs, comprised of farmers and advisors, evaluated the effectiveness of new protocols and tools selected from the toolbox to meet their main challenges. In the UK, three Crop Nutrition Clubs were founded near Fife, Nottinghamshire and on the Staffordshire/Shropshire border. They co-created and adopted farm and field-specific ‘measure-to-manage’ approaches that addressed their crop nutrition challenges.
Establishment of a National Expert Group on crop nutrition
A National Expert Group sought to understand the needs, challenges and barriers faced by farms and establish how farms achieve more optimised nutrition decisions. The club members represent farmers, policymakers, researchers, the fertiliser and manure industry, crop end-users, laboratories and nutrition software companies stakeholders across the industry.
First UK expert group meeting
The National Expert Group met in June 2023 at Sherwood Farms in Leicestershire. The farm owners outlined how they refined their nutrition strategies based on as much information as possible, building an impressive dataset of soil, tissue, sap and grain analysis along with fertiliser input information over time. Working with ADAS crop physiologists, the farm owners used a nutrient balance approach to understand the success of their decision by means of checking inputs vs outputs through grain analysis and tailor their strategy for future years.
Lessons learned
Discussions between experts highlighted the impact of fragmented data and a lack of software and support to farms who are already progressive in the measurements they are taking and data accumulating as a result. The benefit of building farm-specific datasets over time that can help to ‘check’ on nutrition decisions and inform future strategies.
ADAS Crop Physiologist Sarah Kendall notes that:
- Yield and quality calculations
- Nitrogen use efficiency
- Nutrient balancing
- Grain and tissue analysis, soil analysis
- Field observations
- Weather data
- Peer comparisons/benchmarking
- Patterns across farms and fields within farms and across seasons
- Consistency of measurement/analysis methods
- On-farm experiments
- Improved nutrient management software to compile data over years
- More on farm experimentation
- Open access data sharing to improve benchmarking.
- Sharing experiences to change perceptions.
- Simplification of the decision-making process
- Dynamic tools to support tactical decision-making
- Improved yield prediction capability e.g. by using
- Improved weather forecasting
- A discerning food industry that encourages nutritional optimisation
- Understanding carbon footprint of fertiliser applications
For more information on this project, visit the NUTRICHECK NET website.
