Barriers and opportunities of soil knowledge to address soil challenges: Stakeholders' perspectives across Europe.

Climate-smart sustainable management of agricultural soil is critical to improve soil health, enhance food and water security, contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity preservation, and improve human health and wellbeing. The European Joint Programme for Soil (EJP SOIL) started in 2020 with the aim to significantly improve soil management knowledge and create a sustainable and integrated European soil research system. EJP SOIL involves more than 350 scientists across 24 Countries and has been addressing multiple aspects associated with soil management across different European agroecosystems. This study summarizes the key findings of stakeholder consultations conducted at the national level across 20 countries with the aim to identify important barriers and challenges currently affecting soil knowledge but also assess opportunities to overcome these obstacles. Our findings demonstrate that there is significant room for improvement in terms of knowledge production, dissemination and adoption. Among the most important barriers identified by consulted stakeholders are technical, political, social and economic obstacles, which strongly limit the development and full exploitation of the outcomes of soil research. The main soil challenge across consulted member states remains to improve soil organic matter and peat soil conservation while soil water storage capacity is a key challenge in Southern Europe. Findings from this study clearly suggest that going forward climate-smart sustainable soil management will benefit from (1) increases in research funding, (2) the maintenance and valorisation of long-term (field) experiments, (3) the creation of knowledge sharing networks and interlinked national and European infrastructures, and (4) the development of regionally-tailored soil management strategies. All the above-mentioned interventions can contribute to the creation of healthy, resilient and sustainable soil ecosystems across Europe.

The farm-by-farm relationship among carbon productivity and economic performance of agriculture.

The mitigation of agricultural greenhouse gases emissions is a globally relevant environmental and policy issue. For efficient mitigation, it is important to appraise whether and how much these emissions are linked to the economic performance of farms. This study aims to reconstruct a Carbon Productivity (CP) indicator at the farm level to analyse its eventual relationship with the farm's economic performance as measured by its Farm Net Value Added (FNVA). This assessment could allow emerging win-win situations where more emission-efficient farms are also more economically viable. This study is conducted at the micro-level using individual farm data extracted from the Italian Farm Accountancy Data Network from 2008 to 2017. The estimation procedure is based on a dynamic panel model that exploits the wide heterogeneity of farms using structural and policy variables. Results show that the relationship between CP and FNVA is non-linear and changes among farm types. Overall, absolute higher levels of CP seem to be associated with better economic performance, suggesting a double-dividend path of green growth for agricultural production. Policy implications drawn suggest tailored intervention according to farm type.