Potential impacts of Precision Agriculture and Organic Farming on sustainable agriculture in different environments (PROSA)

<p>In the last decades, the world market prices for cash crops decreased continuously. Therefore, export -orientated countries like Brazil has to establish efficient and sustainable agricultural production systems to safe the farmers income and to take care of environmental impacts. In addition, sugar cane for the bio diesel production replaces more and more the food production in the south of Brazil. The industrial production of sugar cane influences the independency of farms (for example contracts are only for 6 years). In this Project, alternative strategies for sustainable food production will be investigated which can compete with sugar cane.</p>

<p>The climatic conditions in Brasil allow the farmers to harvest 2.75 up to 3 crops/year. But this is only possible by optimizing the cropping system. But the increase of the intensity of the cropping system is probably coupled with negative ecologic impacts. So, only if there are investigations on sustainable indicators like humus balances, nutrient balances and bio diversity, a modification of land use systems are acceptable. The innovative technology of Precision Farming makes it possible to increase the efficiency of agricultural production systems on "as demand" basis by considering the small scale variability of soil and plant system interactions. The integration of information based cash crop production for sustainable agriculture will be investigated on a practical farm in the south-west of Brazil and the north of Argentina.</p>