Quantifying the impact of farming practices on soil health in arable lands

Program Code: HORIZON-MISS-2025-05-SOIL-06

Program Type: RIA

Research Areas: Define and map homogeneous soil-use and pedo-climatic regions in EU arable lands, leveraging existing Earth observation datasets and further develop coefficients linking farming practices to soil health indicators. Work should focus on soil biodiversity, carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas emissions, and water infiltration/retention, considering farming practices. Quantify the impact of farming practices on soil health across major pedo-climatic regions and arable crops in the EU. Establish clear links between farming practices, land use (arable, pasture, etc.) and types of crops for each soil use and pedo-climatic region, considering the defining soil and climate properties. Focus should be on identifying synergies and trade-offs among these practices, supported by refined impact estimates under current and potential adoption scenarios at the EU level. Select a set of soil health indicators and develop a dynamic, potentially automatically updated model to compare, analyze and evaluate scenarios assessing the impacts of individual farming practices (e.g., conventional tillage vs. no-tillage, organic amendment vs. mineral fertilization, etc.) as well as integrated farming strategies (e.g., conservation, organic, agroecology, regenerative). Identify and analyze the limitations of map, indicators, model, measurements, and results obtained. Produce a gap analysis to address remaining soil health challenges in Member States.

Total Funding Available: €6M for 1 grant