On-farm research program is ongoing (Task 2.5)

In September 2022, the on-farm monitoring started among the different participant regions in the Transition project (Italy, Spain, Algeria, Egypt, and France).

The selected farms will be ground tested with practitioners for two years. The monitoring includes technical support (e.g., plant and soil analysis), social and economic factors, according to the resilience indicators identified in WP1. Moreover, some the results will be used to feed the crop models to understand and exploit the potential of agricultural systems for storage of organic carbon in soil.

In the case of UVic-UCC, soil and plant samplings were considered in all the 5 selected farms under dryland conditions. The planification was done with the participation of the farmers. According to the crop type, three farms were sampled during November. The first was a traditional combination of winter cereal crop surrounded by olive trees older than 50 y (Fig. 1). The second was a vineyard with cover crops and herd pasture during winter (Fig. 2 and 3). Finally, the third one was a vineyard-system combining rows with or without cover crops, border areas with natural Mediterranean vegetation, olive trees with cover crops and managed forest in the areas with no-depth soil (Fig. 4).