Development of a Framework for the Evaluation of the Environmental Benefits of Controlled Traffic Farming

Abdul Mouazen,Martin Palmqvist

doi:10.3390/su7078684

Abstract

Although controlled traffic farming (CTF) is an environmentally friendly soil management system, no quantitative evaluation of environmental benefits is available. This paper aims at establishing a framework for quantitative evaluation of the environmental benefits of CTF, considering a list of environmental benefits, namely, reducing soil compaction, runoff/erosion, energy requirement and greenhouse gas emission (GHG), conserving organic matter, enhancing soil biodiversity and fertiliser use efficiency. Based on a comprehensive literature review and the European Commission Soil Framework Directive, the choice of and the weighting of the impact of each of the environmental benefits were made. The framework was validated using data from three selected farms. For Colworth farm (Unilever, UK), the framework predicted the largest overall environmental benefit of 59.3% of the theoretically maximum achievable benefits (100%), as compared to the other two farms in Scotland (52%) and Australia (47.3%). This overall benefit could be broken down into: reducing soil compaction (24%), tillage energy requirement (10%) and GHG emissions (3%), enhancing soil biodiversity (7%) and erosion control (6%), conserving organic matter (6%), and improving fertiliser use efficiency (3%). Similar evaluation can be performed for any farm worldwide, providing that data on soil properties, topography, machinery, and weather are available.

Highlights

The high demand on food has resulted in increasing the size and weight of agricultural machinery, which has led to higher risk to soil damage and more energy has to be dedicated to cure this damage.The soil damage by agricultural machinery contributes considerably to deepen soil environmental threats, namely, compaction, erosion, increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and others
This study aims to develop a framework that predicts the overall environmental benefits of controlled traffic farming (CTF) for farms planning to convert to CTF
When establishing the prediction framework to rank the environmental benefits of CTF, several environmental threats were identified as key threats needed for the successful development of the matrix

Summary

Introduction

The soil damage by agricultural machinery contributes considerably to deepen soil environmental threats, namely, compaction, erosion, increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and others. Soil has to be managed properly to ameliorate the damage, either by mechanical forces e.g., tillage, optimising machine parameters, e.g., reduced tyre inflation pressure or by appropriate management of traffic over the soil. The latter has recently attracted the attention of researchers and farmers. Under conventional tillage with random traffic (RT), almost all field area is trafficked by wheels at least once every year [1]. In the last decades, farmers have attempted to concentrate field traffic on temporary or permanent tramlines [2,3]

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Conclusion