Skip to content The overall objective of the SUSFORAGE project is to determine technical and socioeconomic opportunities and barriers on the transition from monocultures to diverse sown forage crops in mixed cut-grazed (polycropping-livestock) sustainable farming systems across a wide range of climates, to develop locally-adapted performance models under climate change conditions in the Mediterranean.
In particular, the specific objectives of SUSFORAGE are:
- Assessing the delivering of goods and services of sown forage mixtures, including yield, nutritious feed, soil diversity and fertility, water use efficiency, pest regulation, climate change mitigation, and crop stability and resilience against climatic uncertainties.
- Designing sustainable polycropping-livestock systems to increase farming competitiveness and understanding the effects of grazing on goods and services’ provisioning by sown forage mixtures.
- Investigating the feeding value of forages from the species-rich meadows and how to incorporate those into the diets for livestock.
- Developing mathematical models to determine the best regionally-adapted composition and proportion of sown species to guarantee resilience and stability of highly nutritious, locally produced, forage in the face of a changing climate.
- Identifying technical and socioeconomic opportunities and barriers to the establishment of polycropping-livestock systems by involving local stakeholders in case-study regions. This multi-actor approach includes gender factors, to achieve a holistic agro-livelihood system re-design.
Work Packages
To achieve the goals, SUSFORAGE will be organized into seven Work Packages:
- WP1 Herbage and livestock services from sown diversity in grazed systems
- WP2 Soil diversity and fertility services from sown diversity in grazed systems
- WP3 Crop and soil health services
- WP4 Climatic services from sown diversity in grazed systems
- WP5 Stakeholder perception in multi-actor socio-ecological workshops, and design of polycropping-livestock systems for resilience
- WP6 Modelling and integration
- WP7 Management and dissemination
Experimental design
Project timeline
