Spain: The Spanish agricultural sector joins forces to fight against climate change

The InfoAdapta-Agri project, launched by the farmers’ organization UPA in collaboration with Bayer, promotes mitigation and adaptation measures in Spanish agriculture in the face of global warming.

Three years ago, as a premonition of the COP25 slogan’s “Time to act”, climate summit taking place in Madrid, UPA launched InfoAdapta-Agri, a project aiming to stop farmers from being mere “spectators” of climate change, whose effects were beginning to be felt in their farms.

With the initial collaboration of Fundación Biodiversidad, now attached to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, and Bayer CropScience, the project focused on identifying measures to adapt agricultural activity to climate change and then “inform, raise awareness and train farmers to put them into place”, UPA expert, Javier Alejandre explains.

The initial 130 measures resulted in the eight “most effective” to reduce the vulnerability of farming systems to climate variability. “We focus on adaptation because we need short-term measures. They are simple techniques, but with clear results for farmers and the environment”.

For UPA, precision agriculture and digitalization offer great opportunities for the rational use of water, fertilizers and phytosanitary products. Another of the measures underway is pest monitoring, which allows farmers to escape from systematic treatments to act only when they are necessary and more effective.

Sustainable soil management, including minimum tillage techniques not to change soil profile, so that the organic matter is not lost and fertility and CO2 sequestration is reduced, is another key to this “new agriculture”.

One of the fundamental aspects of the project are the practices to protect biodiversity. “The inclusion of multifunctional field margins results in a brutal improvement of the pollinators and birds’ populations”.

As for improving nitrogen fertilization, its management must be adapted to the plant needs or soil fertility, which reduces losses due to both leaching and evaporation, one of the mayor sources of GHG emissions.

This organization also advocates a circular economy, with measures bringing farmers closer together. “Benefits of a proximity economy are evident”.

Advisory services are essential as well. “If the scientific and academic world determines mitigation and adaptation measures, but in the end we are not capable of getting them to the farmer, the result will be very poor”.

Source: Eleconomista.es