A MODEL BASED, DISTRICT SCALE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR SWINE MANURE MANAGEMENT

Nitrates from slurries are one of the most important environmental issues regarding intensive livestock farming. Nitrate pollutes water bodies and high nitrates levels in water can also harm human and animal health. Farmers must face up with environmental laws, bureaucracy, manage their own decisions to respect them and to make profit. Farmers have to face these problems with limited tools. In this framework an Individual approaches are extremely inefficient. The purpose of the Ager SEES PIG project, “Multi – regional Solutions to improve the Environmental and Economic Sustainability of Pig manure management in the Regions of the Po and Veneto basin”, within which the present work has been carried out, is to support farmers, administrators and technicians to choose the best technological, environmental and economic solution to manage manure at farm and regional scale. Solutions should be valid through the Regions of the Po and Veneto basin (Piemonte, Lombardia, Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia) in the North of Italy. The doctoral work focused its attention to cropping system simulation model in particular to the development of the agronomic module for the decision support system (DSS) with a user friendly interface. One of the most important aspect related to cropping system simulation by models at the farm – district scale is the high number of simulations to be run. This requires high computing power and, most important, it is time consuming. To overcome this issues, a number of methods aimed at reducing the computational complexity have been proposed. These methods regards technological data, crop rotations, second harvest and soil – climate combinations. Each method was tested and verified with statistical analysis. Simulations outputs, run with these strategies, have been manipulated to calculate a set of multiple linear regressions which are preloaded into the DSS so problems associated to cropping systems simulation model, database and inputs are avoided. The developed DSS is based on a user friendly WebGIS interface and user is not obliged to download any software. With this approach user is not limited by operating system and processor. The DSS allows users, whose farm is located in Regions of the Po and Veneto basin, to design alternative scenarios under different farming conditions (i.e.: irrigation, crops and their area, fertilization, cadastral unit property) and get an answer on the level of nitrogen (N) leached, percolated water and N volatilized from the farm using a minimal set of data.