Stakeholder Perspectives to Prevent Soil Organic Matter Decline in Northeastern Italy

Abstract

A transition from conventional to more sustainable soil management measures (SMMs) is required to reverse the current soil organic matter (SOM) losses in the agroecosystems. Despite the innovations and technologies that are available to prevent SOM decline, top–down knowledge transfer schemes that incentivize a certain measure are often ineffective. Here, we discuss relevant outcomes from a participatory approach where researchers, farmers, practitioners and government officials have discussed opportunities and barriers around SMM application to prevent SOM decline. Within a series of workshops, stakeholders identified, scored, and selected SMMs to field-tests and evaluated the benefits and drawbacks from their application. Results showed that the stakeholders recognized the need for innovations, although they valued the most promising SMM as already available continuous soil cover and conservation agriculture. In contrast, more innovative SMMs, such as biochar use and the variable rate application of organic amendments through precision farming, were the least valued, suggesting that people’s resistance to new technologies is often governed by the socio-cultural perception of them that goes beyond the economic and technological aspects. The valuation of benefits and drawbacks by stakeholders on trialed measures emphasized that stakeholders’ perspective about soil management is a combination of economic, environmental, and socio-cultural aspects, thus corroborating the need for transdisciplinary bottom–up approaches to prevent SOM depletion and increase soil rehabilitation and SOM content.

From Conventional to Precision Fertilization: A Case Study on the Transition for a Small-Medium Farm

“…Some studies recently examined the transfer schemes to incentivize the transition of farmers towards P.A. and enhance the ability of farmers to connect with the know-how, the networks, and the institutions to improve productivity [37,38]: our results (that are in line with their findings) allow farmers to overcome the initial standstill, and put transitioning towards P.A. into practice to gain experience and, in turn, complement the information from numerical and computational analysis [39].…”

Evaluation of the Potential for Soil Organic Carbon Content Monitoring With Farmers

“…When it is not possible to develop simple, reliable, and self-monitorable indicators, result-oriented schemes are simply not effective in meeting the provision goals. This is particularly true for SOC, whose deficiency is not well perceived by farmers (Hijbeek et al, 2017), while farmers commitment is considered a key for sustainable management (Dal Ferro et al, 2020).…”