projects

Insects play a central role in the terrestrial food web. They also fulfil a variety of tasks in the ecosystem. In agriculture, for example, they serve to pollinate many crops. Less well known is the role of many insects as species-specific predators of pests. The promotion of insects is important in order to achieve a balance between beneficial insects and pests, which can save agrochemicals. Flower strips in agricultural landscapes are generally a very good measure to promote insect biodiversity and thus also the following links in the food chain. This can not only promote pollinator performance, but also the formation of fertile soils, which can ultimately lead to an increase in yields in agricultural production. With regard to the maintenance of these flower strips, however, it should be noted that there is clear potential for improvement here. Depending on when it is carried out, the necessary mulching of the crops can presumably have a considerable negative impact on the fundamentally positive characteristics of the flower strips as a habitat for beneficial insects. This is presumably caused by the loss of overwintering habitats for insects hibernating on the soil surface or on plant parts. This unutilised potential for promoting biodiversity must be better exploited. Over the course of two years, the project will observe how insect hatching numbers develop when flower strip maintenance, or more precisely mulching, is shifted from the current usual time in autumn to late spring. This makes it possible to evaluate the various mulching times and derive the best possible management. The figures collected are used to sensitise farmers and agricultural students to the topic. The specific topic can also be used to raise general awareness of the importance of insects in the ecosystem.

Die Bewirtschaftung von landwirtschaftlichen Flächen steht angesichts zunehmender Wetterextremereignisse, ausgelöst durch den Klimawandel, vor großen Herausforderungen. Eine Möglichkeit den sich rasch verändernden Umweltbedingungen gerecht zu werden, ist die Etablierung von Agroforstsystemen. In Agroforstsystemen werden Einzelbäume oder Baumstreifen in landwirtschaftlich genutzte Flächen integriert. Im Vordergrund steht dabei weiterhin die landwirtschaftliche Nutzung der Fläche. Ergänzt wird diese durch die Vorteile und Nutzungsmöglichkeiten des forstlichen Anteils des Systems. Während über Jahrhunderte Bäume von den Äckern entfernt wurden, eröffnet der Agroforst heute neue Perspektiven: Erosions- und Windschutz, Wasserrückhalt, Kohlenstoffsequestrierung im Boden, Schatten für Weidetiere und Förderung der Biodiversität. Dies bringt neben ökologischen Vorteilen auch den Landwirten Vorteile und weitere Nutzungsmöglichkeiten. In Deutschland sind bereits bedeutende Fortschritte in der Praxis der Agroforstwirtschaft zu verzeichnen. Luxemburg steht noch am Anfang der Entwicklung dieser nachhaltigen Landnutzung. Das Projekt wird damit Wegbereiter für die Etablierung erster Agroforstsysteme hierzulande. Um fundierte Entscheidungen bei der Anlage zu treffen, ist eine umfassende Analyse der Bodeneigenschaften unabdingbar. Diese umfasst unter anderem die durchwurzelbare Tiefe des Bodens, die Bodenart und den Bodentyp und somit auch die hydrologischen Eigenschaften des Bodens. Diese Faktoren, im Kontext mit den spezifischen Bedürfnissen und Gestaltungswünschen der Betriebe, beeinflussen nicht nur die Auswahl der Baumarten, sondern auch Ausgestaltung der Anlage der Agroforstfläche.

Agriculture faces major environmental challenges on global, national and local levels. The environmental benefits of organic agriculture and its potential to deal with these challenges are scientifically recognized. The previous government's target of 100% organic farming by 2050, as well as the EU target of 25% organic farming by 2030, have laid the foundations for a strategy for a sustainable food system with the potential to adapt well to climate change. However, a vision how the transition towards this may be done and a thorough analysis of the related challenges is lacking. The VISION 2050 project will model a series of scenarios for the conversion of Luxembourg's agriculture to different shares up to 100% organic production, with the aim of developing a sustainable Luxembourgish organic agriculture and food system in 2050, taking into account climate change and environmental conditions. The starting point is the analysis of the base scenario of the current agricultural system in 2020. This is then extrapolated to the year 2050 considering climate change, thus providing a reference scenario for 2050. Subsequently, a number of scenarios with up to 100% conversion to organic agriculture, partly complemented with other strategies, such as circular food systems, reduced food wastage or reduced concentrate feed will be analysed. The scenario specifications will be done in close collaboration with key stakeholders and with the international scientific board of the project. For all scenarios, various sustainability indicators will be analyzed, with a focus on trade-offs and synergies among them. In close collaboration with the stakeholders, most promising scenarios for a future with higher shares of up to 100% organic farming in Luxembourg will be identified. To link this scenario analysis to the farm level, typical farms for the current baseline situation and the envisaged future with higher shares of organic agriculture will be identified, to illustrate what these changes may mean for the farms and the agricultural sector structure. The output of the project will be a vision for a sustainable 100% organic farming system in Luxembourg for the year 2050. In this vision, climate change adaptation performance and climate change mitigation impacts will be addressed besides other sustainability aspects. These results will provide guidance to Luxembourg on how to design a future sustainable food system.

The cultivation of durum wheat (Triticum turgidum subsp. Durum), is limited to the Mediterranean region and neighbouring areas. In North America, however, durum wheat is also cultivated in more northerly locations with low rainfall and higher temperatures. Thanks to breeding successes and increasing periods of drought as well as temperature rises triggered by climate change, the cultivation of durum wheat is also possible in more northerly locations in Europe. What makes durum wheat so attractive is the semolina obtained from it. This is characterised by a high protein and gluten content, which is why it is ideal for pasta production. There is currently no high-yield durum wheat cultivation in Luxembourg, although the demand for its products is increasing. In addition, durum wheat production in Europe is in deficit, which makes it a niche product and therefore there is an extremely good marketing opportunity for durum wheat. As a result, the project “Development of a value chain from the cultivation of durum wheat to further processing into pasta” was set up as part of the “Plan d'action nationale de l'agriculture biologique PAN-Bio 2025”. As part of the project, the plan is to launch a new pasta product on the market with the highest possible proportion of Luxembourg durum wheat. This will not only expand the range of Luxembourg organic food products, but will also create an outlet for certified organic eggs that cannot be sold on the market due to deviating calibration. The aims of this project are to encourage the cultivation of durum wheat and to provide expert advice from cultivation to marketing. In addition, long-term solutions are to be found for professional storage, cleaning and selection according to quality. Finally, an appropriate price for durum wheat should be ensured, which compensates for additional costs such as cleaning, drying, storage and transport.

Over the past decades, efforts have been made to promote the cultivation of legumes, especially grain legumes such as peas, faba bean, soybean or lupines, in order to reduce the use of mineral N fertilizers, increase biodiversity, reduce dependence on imported feed proteins and improve soil biological properties and humus content. However, grain legumes are still not widely grown. One of the main reasons is “legume fatigue”, which reduces the yields of grain legumes and limits the expansion of legume cultivation in many European environments. The exact causes of legume fatigue are not known, although soil-borne diseases interacting with abiotic factors are thought to play a key role. Recent results suggest that the balance between pathogen load and soil suppressiveness is critical. In several farms and/or regions legume fatigue is not reported to be a problem, while in others it severely limits legume production. The reasons for this variation are not fully understood, but Identification of the causes is urgent, considering biotic and abiotic factors. The aim of this project is therefore to identify the main causal factors and indicators of legume fatigue in a variety of European environments. In this context, easily implementable indicators to assess the risk of legume fatigue, including soil suppressiveness in addition to pathogen load, will be developed. Proposals for agronomic measures to prevent or reduce legume fatigue will be developed and a basis for further targeted research will be established.

With the European Green Deal, the Farm-to-Fork and Biodiversity Strategy, the EU aims to achieve the target of at least 25% of the EU’s agricultural land under organic farming by 2030. This means tripling the current organic farm area with estimated 700.000 farmers expected to enter the organic sector. One of the obstacles hindering conversion to organic farming is the lower yields per hectare grown under organic conditions as compared with those produced under conventional farming. Therefore, improving organic yields is a key challenge of the organic sector, which however needs to be achieved on the basis of the principles of organic farming. Against this background, the overall aim of the project is to contribute to a sustainable increase in yields in organic cropping systems through a comprehensive and structured compilation and evaluation of existing knowledge, devising sustainable impact strategies relevant to stakeholders and policy. The project will set up an European-wide network of testing, experimentation and demonstration sites from 11 regions / countries, representing a wide range of pedo-climatic and structural conditions. It will connect actors from science and practice to jointly reflect on organic yield increase strategies. It will draw recommendations for the future research agenda and development of EU policies relevant for organic production. The outcomes of the project will be widely available and disseminated to actors within and beyond the organic community.

The project PRECISION seeks to develop a decision support tool that can assist farmers in adjusting the N content during the growing season, leading to more sustainable agriculture practices with less leaching and volatilisation of N compounds from the farmlands. To meet these challenges and make agricultural practices more resilient and sustainable; a paradigm shift in agricultural practices is needed urgently. Much of this change can only be achieved through precision agriculture (PA) employing advanced remote sensing (RS) technologies including the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) systems. Data processing is realised using a combination of established methods (ML, DL) and artificial intelligence. Based on these data sets, PRECISON will develop efficient and innovative PA methods using machine and deep learning algorithms that can be immediately applied by the farmers involved in the project.

The main objective of LEGENDARY is to remove the barriers that hamper a significant and stable increase of the growing area of legumes in European cropping systems. Therefore, LEGENDARY has the ambition to develop tools and methods that considerably go beyond the state-of-the-art to quantify the Ecosystem Services of legumes, considering different agro-climatic zones. LEGENDARY will set up intense stakeholder networks, including food/feed processors, advisors and farmers to ensure a strong penetration of the project results into practice and to contribute significantly to more agrobiodiversity and diversified farming systems in the EU and its associated countries.

The high prices for production factors like synthetic fertilizers, as well as their fluctuating availability due to global conflicts and weather events, highlight the need for a farm-internal nutrient supply for agricultural land. Grain legumes play an important role here as a preceding crop and green manure, as they can enrich the soil with nitrogen through rhizobia (Del Pozo & Mera, 2021). Currently, legumes are mainly used as animal feed, although their use is not always practicable due to their antinutritive ingredients and high starch content compared to their protein content. However, coarse-grained legumes also have the potential to be used for human nutrition. While legumes are attracting growing interest from consumers and the media as a foodstuff, there is currently no value chain for processing them in Luxembourg. But there is already an initiative to use protein from legumes grown in Luxembourg to produce meat substitutes. The goal of the project is to promote this development and at the same time to identify further processing possibilities for coarse-grained legumes. As different legumes have different demands on their location, species with very different requirements are selected. This should ensure that farmers can participate in the project regardless of the location of their land.

The government's goal is, to increase the proportion of organically farmed land in Luxembourg from currently around 6% to 20% by 2025 in order to help shape the “green deal” of EU policy in Luxembourg. In order to achieve the government's target of 20% organically farmed land, it must be ensured that the domestic sales channels can absorb, process and market the increased production volumes. Therefore, in this project, for the first time, a complete study of the current situation of the value chain for organic food in terms of production and distribution is being carried out. The data collected serve as a basis for evaluating the performance potential of the value chain in Luxembourg and deriving recommendations for measures. The data obtained in this way is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively in order to evaluate the various companies comparatively. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews are conducted with stakeholders at processing and sales level. Attention is paid particularly to reflect the variety of different types of business, from direct marketing to catering, retail and wholesale, in the interviews. Based on the qualitative analysis of the questionnaires and best-practice examples from Luxemburg and abroad, a catalogue of recommendations for action for each type of company is created. Together with the Ministère de l'Agriculture et de la Viticulture and the stakeholders involved, the various recommendations for actions are prioritized, taking into account various aspects such as potential for improvement, feasibility and costs. This classification serves as a basis for optimally using the existing potential of the value chain for organic food in Luxembourg and for efficiently steering the future direction.

Public concerns about the environment and the detrimental impact of pesticides make that fewer and fewer tools to ensure production are available for farmers. Nonetheless, studies show that banning the use of fungicides results in a decreased agricultural production, thereby further endangering the need to feed a growing world population. For these reasons, there is a huge effort ongoing to find new, environmental-friendly fungicides and these are searched in bacteria, fungi and plants. Plants cannot run away from unfavourable conditions, but they have, through evolution, developed a number of mechanisms that allow them to survive non-optimal conditions, including exposure to pathogens. One of these mechanisms is the synthesis and accumulation of small molecules with activities that protect plants from infections. Among these compounds, saponins are known and studied to protect plants from fungal infections. However not all plants produce the same saponins and this in different quantities, furthermore not all fungi have the same sensitivity for saponins. Mining data from previous projects resulted in the identification of saponins in stems from different Fabaceae, and it was seen that the conditions wherein these plants grow have an impact on the composition of the saponin pools of these plants. Based on this TASSILI will provide the fundamental data for further studies towards the production of saponin-based fungicides extracted from locally-grown Fabaceae (alfalfa, peas, soybean and faba bean). Extracts will be made from different varieties of the mentioned plants. This will generate a set of extracts with different composition and thus potentially different fungicidal activities against plant pathogenic fungi. The activity of these extracts will be tested against some common plant pathogenic fungi: Botrytis cinerea (a pathogen in viticulture), Fusarium graminearum and Zymoseptoria tritici two important pathogens in grain cultivation. By testing a diverse set of extracts against these fungi, TASSILI will result in the correlation between the composition of the extracts and the measured fungicidal activity. Furthermore, the saponins that contribute most to this activity will be identified.

In recent years, the importance and need for broadband and high-speed connectivity has steadily increased. The Covid-19 pandemic has even accelerated this process towards a more connected society. However, this applies mainly to cities and metropolitan areas. In Europe, 13% of the population still lacks connectivity in any form. This mainly affects rural regions. Due to the lower commercial attractiveness, solutions prove to be compareably more difficult. COMMECT aims to bridge this gap by providing quality, reliability and security in terms of digital access for rural areas. The goal of expanding broadband connectivity in remote areas is achieved by integrating non-terrestrial networks with terrestrial XG mobile networks and low-cost Internet of Things (IoT). Artificial intelligence, edge and network automation will reduce energy consumption at both the connectivity and compute levels. A participatory approach with end users and IT experts working together on development challenges will be key to digitizing the sector. In doing so, COMMECT will build intensive exchange of best practices and technical knowledge among agroforestry value chain actors. Five Living Labs (model regions) will be established inside and outside Europe, where "problems" and "benefits" of connectivity will be derived from different perspectives for end users. The "Living Lab Luxembourg", which is also the focus of IBLA's work, deals with the digitalization of Luxembourg's viticulture. At the beginning, the needs of the stakeholders (winegrowers) for digital area information for the management in the areas of irrigation, fertilization and plant protection, among others, are determined in workshops. On this basis, relevant data will be made available to the stakeholders for their cultivation decisions, as well as decision-support systems will be made usable. Demonstration events will be held to eventually improve awareness and acceptance of digital technologies in viticulture.

Agriculture has a direct influence on ground- and surface water through soil management and can therefore make a significant contribution to maintaining good drinking water quality. Organic farming is inherently useful to water conservation through management according to natural matter cycles, area-based animal husbandry, diverse crop rotations and the permanent avoidance of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers. With the financial support of the drinking water suppliers Ville de Luxembourg (VdL), the Syndicat des Eaux du Sud (SES), the Syndicat des Eaux du Barrage d'Esch-sur-Sûre (SEBES) together with the Landwirtschaftlech Kooperatioun Uerwersauer (LAKU), the Distribution d'Eau des Ardennes (DEA) and the Natur & Geopark Mëllerdall (NGPM), as well as the Administration de la gestion de l'eau (AGE) of the Ministère de l'Environnement, du Climat et du Développement durable, IBLA advises farmers on all aspects of organic farming. In addition, pilot projects and demonstration trials are carried out on topics and techniques relevant to water protection (mechanical weed control, cultivation of legumes, alternative crops to maize) in order to support practitioners in the management of land in water protection areas in the most targeted and farm-oriented way possible. On top of that, IBLA, on behalf of Luxembourgs organic agriculture, actively participates in various committees, working groups and accompanying committees on the topic of (drinking) water protection.

In order to provide farmers with the basics of organic farming as well as new scientific and at the same time practice-relevant findings from this field, there is a need for specialized written materials that are specifically targeted at practitioners. Since 2009, IBLA has already participated in the preparation and publication of such information materials in collaboration with European partners such as the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FIBL). To ensure that the target group of Luxembourg agriculture can be informed in a way that is as tailored as possible to their needs, the IBLA has been drafting relevant technical literature specifically adapted to Luxembourg as a location since 2021. The advantage of such an approach lies in the fact that the knowledge communicated on the basis of existing international technical brochures is both brought together and supplemented by experience gained in-house. In addition to preparing and publishing fact sheets, IBLA is now also working on variety information sheets containing the results of variety trials in organic farming. These are a supplement to the national list of varieties and contain more detailed information on plant development, which covers the special information needs of organic farms.

To feed themselves, the Luxembourg population uses on average about 3700 m². However, only 2000 m² per capita are available to the inhabitants of Luxembourg for the production of food. This area is divided into 50% grassland and 50% arable land. The arable land can be used to grow food for direct human consumption (e.g. potatoes or vegetables). With these products, a healthy, seasonally varied diet is possible, while fodder for the production of animal food can also be grown. The available 1000 m² of grassland are used for keeping cattle, because only they can make the best use of the grass. At the "Haus vun der Natur" this is illustrated on a demonstration area of 2000 m² and made accessible to the public. Here, regional crops are cultivated in organic farming methods in the proportions of land that could represent a possible healthy diet for the population of Luxembourg. On the project area, possibilities of an environmentally friendly diet are shown and the amount of climate-damaging greenhouse gases associated with the cultivation is presented. We welcome you at the "Haus vun der Natur", just contact us!

The aim of the variety trials is to give Luxembourgish organic farmers meaningful recommendations for the variety selection. For this purpose, winter wheat cultivation trials in organic farming were implemented by IBLA in cooperation with the Lycée Technique Agricole (LTA) in the season 2009/10. In recent years, further crops have been added to the variety trials. On the basis of these trials, a list of varieties is issued each year by the National Variety Commission as an aid for the selection of varieties for the farmers.