Practical digital solutions for climate protection
digiMan aims to test existing digital solutions for their practical suitability, make them user-friendly and further develop them in a needs-based and scientifically sound manner. This concerns three components of management: data acquisition, data processing and decision-making. On a technical level, the aim of digiMan is to design the digitalization of the management components in such a way that site-specific fertilization in the sense of precision agriculture becomes simple. To this end, particular emphasis is placed on adapting digital tools for organic farming.
Nitrogen fertilization is the focus of the project, as it is a key factor for productivity but also for environmental pollution in agriculture. The digital technologies used in digiMan are intended to serve the following overarching goals:
- Increase N-efficiency in crop production
- Reduction of nitrate and nitrous oxide emissions
- Increasing C stocks in the soil and maintaining its long-term yield capacity
- Evaluation of opportunities and obstacles of digital tools from an operational perspective
- Review of climate impacts with regard to greenhouse gases
Transfer into practice is the main objective of the project. The supra-regional application of digital methods for sustainable soil management in agriculture is to be achieved through several measures:
- Inclusion of organic and conventional farms
- Use of commercially available mobile proximal sensors in combination with freely available satellite data to record the area variability of soil properties, yield development and yield potentials
- Cross-regional application and testing of the methods in strongly contrasting soil-climate regions of Bavaria and Brandenburg
- Implementation on a large number of farms
- Evaluation of the methods from an economic and climate protection perspective