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Beyond land consolidation: Lower production costs and higher bio-diversity through optimized agricultural land parceling
Economic and ecological assessment of optimizing size and shape of agricultural land parcels in the Flaachtal region in the Canton of Zurich.
Keywords: Optimization, land fragmentation, machinery cost
Background
High machinery costs are still a major factor for the relatively low competitiveness of Swiss agriculture. In this context, the small-scaled, asymmetric and highly fragmentized agricultural landscape contributes to a sub-optimal use of machinery and high efficiency losses. At the same time, digitalization of agricultural i.e., precision farming techniques, robotics or self-driving tractors are supposed to revolutionize the agricultural sector. To profit from these potentially expensive techniques, however, agricultural landscape and new technologies could be harmonized. This implies not only a re-allocation of parcels – as already applied in agricultural land-use planning and melioration projects – but may also imply the search for more symmetrical parcels. This would allow to reduce farmers’ production costs and at the same time to spare land at the edges of the parcels for ecological purposes i.e., flower strips or other ecological compensation measures.
Research questions
•How high are the reductions in machinery costs with more symmetric parcel within a given agricultural landscape pattern?
•What are potential benefits from sparing field edges for ecological purposes?
•What is the potential to reduce CO2 emissions from land consolidation?
•What would be the impact on overall agricultural production in a case study region (Flaachtal Canton of Zurich)?
Methods and Data
The candidate will use spatially explicit land-use information from AGIS (provided by the Canton of Zurich) and machinery cost planning data (provided by Agroscope) to calculate the potential economic gains from a more symmetric parcel structure. The improved parcel shapes and the spared area for ecological compensation measures are calculated in GIS. The trade-offs between total agricultural pro-duction and efficiency gains with optimized parceling are calculate using a simple optimization algo-rithm. Economic and ecological impacts will be assessed with extensive sensitivity analyses. The thesis would be undertaken in the context of our research in the project AgroCO2ncept.
Literature
•Demetriou D. 2013. The Development of an Integrated Planning and Decision Support System (IPDSS) for Land Consolidation. Springer Theses. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02347-2.
•Kwinta A. and Gniadek J. 2017. The description of parcel geometry and its application in terms of land consolidation planning. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. Volume 136, 117-124.
•Aurbacher, J., & Dabbert, S. 2009. Integrating GIS-based field data and farm modeling in a wa-tershed to assess the cost of erosion control measures: An example from southwest Germany. Journal of soil and water conservation, 64(5), 350-362.
Background High machinery costs are still a major factor for the relatively low competitiveness of Swiss agriculture. In this context, the small-scaled, asymmetric and highly fragmentized agricultural landscape contributes to a sub-optimal use of machinery and high efficiency losses. At the same time, digitalization of agricultural i.e., precision farming techniques, robotics or self-driving tractors are supposed to revolutionize the agricultural sector. To profit from these potentially expensive techniques, however, agricultural landscape and new technologies could be harmonized. This implies not only a re-allocation of parcels – as already applied in agricultural land-use planning and melioration projects – but may also imply the search for more symmetrical parcels. This would allow to reduce farmers’ production costs and at the same time to spare land at the edges of the parcels for ecological purposes i.e., flower strips or other ecological compensation measures.
Research questions •How high are the reductions in machinery costs with more symmetric parcel within a given agricultural landscape pattern? •What are potential benefits from sparing field edges for ecological purposes? •What is the potential to reduce CO2 emissions from land consolidation? •What would be the impact on overall agricultural production in a case study region (Flaachtal Canton of Zurich)?
Methods and Data The candidate will use spatially explicit land-use information from AGIS (provided by the Canton of Zurich) and machinery cost planning data (provided by Agroscope) to calculate the potential economic gains from a more symmetric parcel structure. The improved parcel shapes and the spared area for ecological compensation measures are calculated in GIS. The trade-offs between total agricultural pro-duction and efficiency gains with optimized parceling are calculate using a simple optimization algo-rithm. Economic and ecological impacts will be assessed with extensive sensitivity analyses. The thesis would be undertaken in the context of our research in the project AgroCO2ncept.
Literature •Demetriou D. 2013. The Development of an Integrated Planning and Decision Support System (IPDSS) for Land Consolidation. Springer Theses. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02347-2. •Kwinta A. and Gniadek J. 2017. The description of parcel geometry and its application in terms of land consolidation planning. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. Volume 136, 117-124. •Aurbacher, J., & Dabbert, S. 2009. Integrating GIS-based field data and farm modeling in a wa-tershed to assess the cost of erosion control measures: An example from southwest Germany. Journal of soil and water conservation, 64(5), 350-362.
Economic and ecological assessment of optimizing size and shape of agricultural land parcels
Economic and ecological assessment of optimizing size and shape of agricultural land parcels