ReSET Agriculture

Objective and expected benefits: Produce food for local communities. On a longer time-scale food security may become a key factor in climate change adaptation and increasing economic and food resilience. Since changing agricultural practices occur on a long time-scale too, we advice to transition early away from monocultures to a diversified agriculture. Several additional benefits are expected by increasing this circular economy: higher sustainability, limit food waste, reduced emissions connected to food transport, economic democracy, and social justice as well as preservation of traditional small scale farming practices that help preserve local landscapes relevant for the tourism sector. An increased social capital, awareness and pro-activity of people around agriculture may increase the relationship between consumer and producer of agricultural goods.

How to reach the objectives:

• Promote establishment of informal, formal and inter-institutional spaces for discussion where people are welcome to share and co-create knowledge and practises about food and agriculture
• Support local food-coops, example of economic democracy and inclusion of consumers in food-chain management;
• support access to local, organic, healthy food for people with lower economic possibilities by subsidising local farmers selling directly to poor people or finding other strategies;
• recognize the right of people to express own preferences in public eating places such as schools, hospitals, cantines regarding ethical, religious and cultural appropriateness of food.

Objective and expected benefits: No technology that exists today is a carbon sink as effective as plants. Agriculture, the royal discipline of stewardship of nature, can pursue practices that foster carbon. Besides compensating emissions, some practices provide improved soil fertility.

How to reach the objectives:

• Leave plant residues on the field to fix carbon when residues are incorporated in the soil. This will also improve soil fertility and thereby reduce the need for fertilizers. In particular: When clearing apple orchards, tree wood must be shredded and left on the field or incorporated in the ground to fixate tree-captured carbon in the soil, rather than burned.
• Share of permanent greenlands (meadows and alpine pastures) has to be increased as they provide a huge CO2 sink   
• CO2 balance of apple production should be improved by shredding and soil incorporation of wood from cleared orchards. Orchard clearing should be performed as carefully as possible to avoid soil disturbance leading to CO2 emission.
• Good agronomic practices strengthening soil’s role as CO2 sink should be adopted (intercropping, mulching, reduction of mineral fertilizers)
• Animal slurry should be used for producing energy in biogas plants
• Use of up-to-date storage systems for manure, especially during fermentation during storage by means of using biogas plants or other ways that hinder emissions (ibid).
• Biogas plants use only for residual materials.
• Promote a circular economy and drastically reduce the import of externally produced fodder, thereby reducing the related environmental damage caused by its production as well as emissions caused during transport.
• The market price of milk and derived products must include externalized costs due to environmental and climate damage. Thus it is essential to remove all subsidies for this industry and tax the emissions caused by dairy products which are the highest emitter in South Tyrol’s agriculture.

Objective and expected benefits: Reduce dependency of farmers on external food resources (imported mashes etc.)

How to reach the objectives:

• Establish circular economy structures to reduce farmer’s dependency on forage imports
  • On farm level to enable farmers to produce their own forages and mashes
  • On provincial level to create a producer and supplier network in South Tyrol that produces forages for local farmers
• Sensitize consumers for the value of products from mountain areas and their higher price through information campaigns, for instance through the publicly funded marketing organization IDM.

Objective and expected benefits: higher sustainability, economic democracy, and social justice in ST through stronger small farmers economy, reduction of emissions connected to food transport and limitation of food waste.

How to reach the objectives:

• Diffuse participatory guarantee systems as direct control of local communities over production and externalities

Objective and expected benefits: Rural Criticism/Ecocriticism: Awareness raising through promoting literature on agriculture and environmental issues (see: Rural Criticism – Erzählungen über ländliche Räume (rural-criticism.eu)

How to reach the objectives:

• Promote creation of community supported agriculture and partnership between consumers and producers to offer space of co-planning of plantations takes place

Objective and expected benefits: Agroecosystems in mountain areas can fulfill both ecological and economical goals: they produce high-quality products and provide a high biodiversity. Smart extensification or graded agricultural use (“abgestufte Bewirtschaftung”) reconciles intensive production that show low species occurrence with extensive production with a high biodiversity. This way, mountain areas can both deliver high-quality products and ecosystem services such as a high biodiversity, water retention, cultural landscape and risk reduction for natural hazards (soil erosion, avalanches, etc.)

How to reach the objectives:

• Introduce the concept of “abgestufte Bewirtschaftung” (graded agricultural use) for South Tyrolean farms: favorable locations in the valleys and on plain sites around farms are used for intensive production whereas remote areas on unfavorable sites are under extensive use such as low-density grazing. This way, agricultural land in mountain areas can both be used for intensive production with high yields and a low biodiversity grade and extensive production with low yields but high numbers of species. 
• Semi-intensively used land should be moved towards extensively or intensively used land to save resources, cost, labor and areas rich in biodiversity.

Objective and expected benefits: Soil degradation and loss of soil fertility and resilience increases in South Tyrol due to wrong agronomic practices. This happens especially due to the over-fertilizing of permanent grasslands with nitrogen (manure) and permanent crops (phosphorus, mineral fertilizer) and exaggerated irrigation leading to nutrient leakage and reduced biodiversity. Mineral fertilizers are made from petrol or finite sources (f.e. phosphor to be exhausted by 2050) and degradate soil structure and soil fertility. Thus, farmers should limit their use to maintaining soil fertility and where supply from soil ressources (Nachlieferung) is not sufficient.

How to reach the objectives:

• Soil fertility is to be maintained and increased by optimizing fertilizer use by adjusting their amount and composition to the respective site and microclimate and by the correct combination of mineral and organic fertilizers leading to a reduced need for mineral fertilizers.
• Good agronomic practices such as crop rotation,cover and catch crops and mulching (also using harvest or pruning residues) must be applied across all agricultural sectors in order to increase soil organic matter, improve soil structure, water and CO2 storage capacity thus improving soil fertility. They also increase resilience against drought and heat stress and erosion due to extreme weather events.
• To make water use more efficient, data-based water management systems via sensors are to be adapted to determine real irrigation needs, to save water and to avoid nutrient leakage.

Objective and expected benefits: increased social capital, awareness and pro-activity of people around agriculture strength and weakness, needs, limits and potentialities, promoting food sovereignty and food justice/inclusivity and enhancing societal resilience, social justice and economic democracy

How to reach the objectives:

• Promote creation of community supported agriculture and partnership between consumers and producers to offer space of co-planning of plantations takes place

Objective and expected benefits: Diet-related GHG emissions form an important part of an individual’s carbon footprint. Dietary emissions need to be considered at an individual level but also need to be grounded in the broader individual emission and geographical context.

How to reach the objectives:

• Introduce more plant based diets and locally sourced organic produce.
• Reduce food waste.