As the larger part of the residual soil nitrate in late autumn leaches out during the wet winter months, some regions monitor these residues to convince farmers to adopt improved fertilisation practices in order to reduce nitrate pollution. However, the reduction of the nitrate concentration in the surface and groundwater remains limited, especially in regions with intensive vegetable production. Soil-based advisory systems are recommended to reduce nitrate leaching, but it is unclear if this is sufficient to meet the EU nitrate directives. The objectives of this study were to assess localized fertilizer placement, soil-based fertilization, soil-based fertilizer recommendations and nitrate monitoring policies using a simulation with historical weather data. For this purpose, the ECOFERT model was proposed, a pseudo-2D expansion of the WAVE model to simulate the heterogeneity of vegetable root development. The model was calibrated and validated for a cauliflower-leek rotation on three-year experimental data. The results show that a soil-based advisory system reduces nitrate leaching and residual soil nitrate while maintaining similar biomass production levels compared to a fixed high fertilisation rate. However, in most simulated cases, the fertilisation advice was still too high to meet the legal limits of 50 mg NO3 l-1 in the percolated water or 85 kg N ha-1 residual soil nitrate in autumn. This was attributed to considerable mineralisation and crop N-uptake variability caused by weather variation compared to fixed values. The simulations identified the potential of localised N-application and soil-based advisory systems but also showed some weaknesses. This will allow researchers to improve N-advisory systems to reduce nitrate pollution.