Farmers’ perception of soil health in the EU and in China

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Farmers’ perception of soil health in the EU and in China

The TUdi project - now in its third year - involving researchers from the Institute for Soil Sciences, aims to reduce unsustainable farming practices and to improve soil conditions. A number of technologies are now available to farmers to significantly reduce soil degradation. However, their application varies widely from country to country and from farm to farm. The reasons for these differences were investigated by the researchers in their countries using a questionnaire method.

The results made it clear that the farm size, the management methods and the level of education of the farm managers were significantly associated with perceptions of soil degradation issues. This suggests that the provision of information on soil degradation to farmers in an appropriate format is key to the application of measures to counteract it. Projects such as TUdi can help to create collaborative networks to encourage the uptake of technologies widely adopted by farmers and thus reverse the degradation of agricultural land.

The results of the project have been published in the following article:

Falcão, R. N. R., Vrana, M., Hudek, C., Pittarello, M., Zavattaro, L., Moretti, B., Strauss, P., Liebhard, G., Li, Y., Zhang, X., Bauer, M., Dostál, T., Gomez, J. A., Benavente-Ferraces, I., García-Gil, J. C., Plaza, C., Guzmán, G., Lopez, M. L., Pirkó, B. … Krása, J. (2024). Farmers’ perception of soil health: The use of quality data and its implication for farm management. Soil Use and Management, 40, e13023. https://doi.org/10.1111/sum.13023