Modelling representative and coherent Danish farm types based on farm accountancy data for use in environmental assessments

Abstract

There is a need for valid and representative data on the production, resource use and emissions from different farm types in Denmark for public regulation and assessment. The data should be usable for both area-based environmental assessment (e.g. nitrate leaching per ha) and product-oriented environmental assessment (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions per kg pork). The objective of this study was to establish a national agricultural model for estimating data on resource use, production and environmentally important emissions for a set of representative farm types.Every year a sample of farm accounts is established in order to report Danish agro-economical data to the 'Farm Accountancy Data Network' (FADN), and to produce 'The annual Danish account statistics for agriculture'. The farm accounts are selected and weighted to be representative for the Danish agricultural sector, and similar samples of farm accounts are collected in most of the European countries. Based on a sample of 2138 farm accounts from year 1999 a national agricultural model, consisting of 31 farm types, was constructed. The farm accounts were grouped according to the major soil types, the number of working hours, the most important enterprise (dairy, pig, different cash crops), livestock density, etc. For each group the farm account data on the average resource use, products sold, land use and herd structure were used to establish a farm type with coherency between livestock production, feed use, land use, yields, imported feed, homegrown feed, manure production, fertilizer use and crop production. The set of farm types was scaled up to national level thus representing the whole Danish agricultural sector and the resulting production, resource use and land use was checked against the national statistics. Nutrient balance methodology and state-of-the-art emission models and factors were used to establish the emissions of nitrate, phosphate, ammonia, nitrous oxide, methane and fossil carbon dioxide from each farm type. In this paper data on resource uses and emissions from selected farm types are presented and it is demonstrated that this approach can lead to an agro-environmental inventory, which is consistent with national level estimates and still has the advantage of being disaggregated to specific farm types. Conventional dairy farm types in general emitted more nitrate but less phosphate compared with pig farm types. The methane emission was higher from dairy farm types compared with all other farm types. In general the conventional dairy farms emitted more nitrate, ammonia, and nitrous oxide, compared with organic dairy farms. #

Use of long-term monitoring data to derive a relationship between nitrogen surplus and nitrate leaching for grassland and arable land on well-drained sandy soils in the Netherlands

“…These results clearly demonstrate that farm types with the highest percentage of grassland had the lowest NLFs. Our results and those of Dalgaard et al (2006) are in agreement with the findings of Simmelsgaard (1998), who showed that N leaching was negatively related to the time during which the soil was covered by a growing crop.…”

“…Wachendorf et al (2004) reported NLFs of between 0.30 and 0.40 for grassland on a peaty, coarse-textured sandy podzol, with relatively deep groundwater tables (a depth of 1.0-1.5 m in winter and 1.5-2.0 m in summer) in a field experiment in Germany. Dalgaard et al (2006) provided data from the Danish Farm Accountancy Data Network and model calculations on nitrate leaching for farms on sandy soils with an N surplus ranging from 78 to 209 kg/ha. Using these data, we calculated NLFs ranging from 0.64 to 0.94 for farm types with less than 15% grassland and from 0.29 to 0.63 for farm types with 34-54% grassland.…”

“…NLFs are used in more models (Velthof et al 2009;Owens et al 2012), but NLFs used in models in the USA and the UK related N use instead of N surplus to nitrate leaching from the root zone (Owens et al 2012). NLFs are normally derived using data from lysimeter plot and field experiments (Simmelsgaard 1998;Wachendorf et al 2004Wachendorf et al , 2006Barton et al 2009;Perego et al 2012) or model calculations (Dalgaard et al 2006;Owens et al 2012).…”

Sustainable governance of the agriculture and the Baltic Sea — Agricultural reforms, food production and curbed eutrophication

“…3) compared to 57 kg N/ha (28 + 29) for the average field surplus of Swedish agriculture. Nitrate leaching is assumed to be equal to the nitrogen surplus minus ammonia losses, denitrification and net change in soil N status according to Dalgaard et al (2006) and Kristensen et al (2005). Using calculations of average drainage leakage in Swedish agriculture (Brandt and Ejhed, 2002) and additional leakage to ground water (Brink, 1990) an average of 45% of the calculated field surplus of 57 kg N/ha and year in Swedish agriculture is lost in field leakage.…”

Technological and sensory quality of grain and baking products from spelt wheat

“…Wheat is ranked among four most significant crops from the human caloric intake point of view (Moudry et al, 2013a;Moudry et al, 2013b;Jelinkova et al, 2016). Apart from their nutritional, health and technological parameters, impact of cereals of the environmental sustainability was also evaluated in our research, pursuant to our attempt to evaluate farming and food products from broader point of view (Dalgaard et al, 2006). Food consumption patterns were counted and assessed in particular (Wallgren & Hojer, 2009).…”