Soil-Water Effects of Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions Should Be Weighed in Conjunction with Carbon Farming

Abstract

Soil-water practice is essential for farm sustainability, thereby establishing the reference level for agricultural policy of the European Union (EU). This paper focuses on the critical gap in the knowledge surrounding comparison of soil-water effects of Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) and carbon farming. We aim to interrogate the tasks assigned to soil-water standards during the 2005–2020 timeframe and identify soil-water effects under selected soil-water GAEC topics. The farm-level and landscape-scale effects were weighed for each standard. The investigation included an extensive meta-review of documents that featured scientific work on sustainable practice. In each GAEC document, soil-water sustainability was weighed vis-a-vis carbon farming. Our main finding was that the identification of soil-water effects within GAEC was addressed both at farm-enterprise level (E) and landscape scale (L). This identification was very similar among the sampled Member States (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). A small differentiation was detected in how exact the guidance under each standard was in each of these Member States, and hence how the prioritization was scored, ranging from 1, most influential, to 5, least influential. The scores that prevailed were 2.5–5 on the part of the scoring instrument. Carbon farming is a welcome addition to the corpus of good farming practice and is complementary to GAEC.

Keywords

• good agricultural practice
• soil sustainability
• standards
• soil carbon
• water use