Integrated
Procedures for Evaluating Technical, Environmental and Economical Aspects
in Farms: The SIPEAA Project
Donatelli
M., Acutis M., Danuso F., Mazzetto F., Nasuelli P., Nelson R., Omicini A.,
Speroni M., Trevisan M., Tugnoli V.
Paper
presented to VII European Society fo Agronomy Congress, Cordoba 15-18 July,
2002
Introduction
The often contrasting and evolving goals between producers
and policy makers to satisfy consumer, ecologic, economic and social requirements
that have increased in recent history, require the evaluation of agricultural
systems with an equally adaptable perspective. Producers have long term intimate
knowledge about the effect of production factors on yield in their environment,
but often lack knowledge about the ecological effects of their systems. Farmers
may have mastery of the management options in order to achieve both yield stability
and profitability in slow changing systems, but often lack information needed
to adapt to fast changing regulations and/or environmental conditions. From
the policy makers’ perspective, the wide variability of environments, agricultural
practices, economic and social constraints have frequently demonstrated that
there is no unique package of solutions to achieve the expectation of both producers
and consumers. Policy makers would benefit by tools designed to evaluate a broad
range of complex scenarios to produce regulations that would define the parameters
for production techniques that would effectively satisfy the requirements of
their constituency. In many situations, extension services are ready to provide
assistance on specific aspects of crop management, but they are not properly
equipped to help producers adjust their agricultural systems to accommodate
the at times substantial changes needed to cope with new regulations. In recent
decades significant advances have been made in the development of computer based
tools and particularly computer simulation models for application to agricultural
systems and may provide an effective way to bring the agricultural policy and
production goal perspectives into resolution. Both interdisciplinary integration
and the subsequent development of operational tools have several challenges
for further progress. Integrating well documented models which refer to different
domains of the farming system would provide an approach to evaluate agriculture
management strategies accounting for the wide variety of goals and constraints
in many countries.
