Optimising crop production for climate protection

Background and Objective

Agricultural food production in particular faces an uncertain future and there is a considerable need for information on suitable climate protection strategies. The overall objective of the project is to identify suitable management measures and operational strategies for optimising crop production in terms of climate protection.

The work at the Thuenen Institute aims to optimise crop diversification of different crops and varieties for climate change mitigation, particularly with respect to resistance to extreme weather events. To this end, statistical methods
will be used to map the relationships between weather events, yields and climate impacts, and agricultural farm models will be used to derive optimal cropping conditions for different locations and farm types (e.g. conventional, organic; cash crops, dairy cattle) under different climate scenarios.

Approach

In a first step, extreme weather indices will be further developed to derive extreme weather effects on yields using impact-oriented damage thresholds. On this basis, weather-related yield fluctuations will be analysed by combining yield data for the period 1995-2021 with corresponding weather data. In a second step, the relevant correlation structures for different crops are estimated using Copula. Based on this, a stochastic model is developed to generate consistent weather-yield-price scenarios for Monte Carlo simulations. In the third step, a farm model is specified to analyse the climate impacts and economic effects of different crop portfolios (varieties, crops, rotations) for selected locations and different farm types. In the fourth step, the climate impacts, economic efficiency and income stability of currently observed and further developed crop portfolios and mitigation strategies will be analysed under selected climate scenarios. The economic impacts of different crop portfolios will be validated in a workshop with agricultural advisors.