Action led by Terrasystem, aims to review a selection of existing IT Tools for farm management in order to assess their potential and gaps in the application of Carbon Farming practices. These tools, mainly represented by commercial software but also by modelling software developed within European research projects, are basically conceived as Decision Support Systems (DSS) and support systems for the crops and farm management.
A public web repository of selected applications that all users/farmers can access was produced; this include the description of the tools main features, list and description of identificated utilities and gaps in relation to the carbon cycle assessment.
In order to organise and harmonise the identified tools dataset, a database has been designed, consisting of two main tables that are linked to each other through the key field “Name”:
- A more general table named “Management for sustainability of agricultural landscapes” including all the identified tools.
- A more specific table named “Carbon management” including only the tools considered more relevant to the carbon management in agriculture.
In order to group and make the analysis of the tools more effective, a classification of the tools into 10 categories and appropriate sub-categories, based on the features provided, was performed. For the definition of the classes, the various classification systems found in the literature were taken into consideration, harmonising and modifying them to make them suitable for our purpose.
For the most relevant tools to the carbon management in agriculture, a further classification in three classes (low, medium, high) was carried out, related to the level of relevance to carbon farming practices.
In addition to the classifications, in the general table “Management for sustainability of agricultural landscapes”, for each tool the following informations were provided: name, link, creator/author/provider, distribution platform, classes of crops involved, description and purpose of the tool, geographical area of development and use, terms of use and references.
For the tools included in the “Carbon management” table, indications were added regarding the geographical area of or use, carbon farming practices considered, terms of use and the possibility to provide a carbon stock evaluation.
A total of 116 tools relative to “Management for sustainability of agricultural landscapes” have been identified and classified.
Among them a total of 36 tools more specific to “Carbon management” have been identified.
16 tools are identified as highly relevant to carbon farming for farmers, 10 were implemented for the European area (3 free and 7 paid services) of which 7 could be used in Italy (3 free and 4 paid services).
Geographical area of development for “Carbon management” tools
The public web repository and the brochure related to Action A6 task 1 will be available soon for consulting in the download section of the website (https://c-farms.eu/it/news/).
This action supports the increase in the knowledge of the state of the art of tools that could raise awareness and influence the adoption of mitigation practices; the identification of the gaps in the existing instruments could guide further development and improvement of ad-hoc tools and give a contribution for their adoption.
