FaST-Navigator

A common framework for the quantitative advice of crop nutrient requirements and greenhouse gas emissions and removal assessment at farm level

© Fabian Faber - Fotolia

On June 25, 2021, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU and the European Commission agreed on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The new CAP will start in 2023 and will, among other things, require member states to provide their farmers with a Farm Sustainability Tool for Nutrients (FaST). FaST is a digital agricultural tool that can be operated on smartphones, tablets and computers. It combines existing data with manual farmer input to provide tailored fertilizer recommendations using a nutrient management plan.

The FaST Navigator project addressed one of the major challenges in the implementation of the instrument: the creation of operational models that provide standardized and consistent recommendations for the use of fertilizers and the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions under different conditions of data availability. The data requirements of these models range from very precise algorithms based on detailed data to more operational methods based on general data available to the vast majority of farmers.

The project results and models are available to administrations and private institutions and are part of the support provided by the European Commission for the implementation of FaST.

Within the project, ifeu was responsible for the preparation of the greenhouse gas models. The calculation of greenhouse gas emissions covers the entire farm level (crop production, livestock, forest management) as well as all emission sources and especially sinks in soils and biomass. The models are essentially based on the methods and rules of the IPCC, whereby different levels of detail are applied in order to be able to represent differences in data availability.