It takes mere seconds to compact a soil, but years or even decades for it to recover. Biological activities by plant roots and soil organisms (earthworms) as well as physical effects like drying out and rewetting phases, and freezing-thawing cycles are vital for natural regeneration. Exactly how recovery happens is being investigated in a long-term field trial. For this, an observational infrastructure with hundreds of soil probes – the Soil Structure Observatory (SSO) – was set up in 2014 together with ETH Zurich. After the initial compaction event, a fallow, a permanent grassland and a crop rotation with and without tillage were set up. This allows to analyse e.g. the influence of plants and tillage on recovery.
Milkers frequently suffer from musculoskeletal disorders, especially in the area of the shoulders and arms. Agroscope therefore investigated whether appropriate working heights can reduce workload in the milking parlour. For this, the angle of flexion of various joints during milking was recorded in one experiment, whilst a second experiment recorded muscle contractions at three different heights. The study showed that although a lower working height in the milking parlour has no effect on forearms or upper arms, it significantly reduces strain on the shoulders.
Saturated and near-saturated hydraulic conductivities K (mm/h) are important soil properties that determine the partitioning of precipitation into surface runoff and infiltration and indicate soil susceptibility to preferential flow as well as soil aeration properties. Measurements of saturated and near-saturated soil hydraulic conductivities are time consuming and not practical for larger scales where they are mostly needed. The research community has therefore put effort in deriving pedotransfer functions to predict K using proxy variables. The precision of such pedotransfer functions has been very modest, however. As a result, recent studies have focused on assembling and analyzing bigger databases, aiming to find better predictors for the saturated and near-saturated soil hydraulic conductivities. A prominent example is the meta-database on tension-disk infiltrometer data compiled by Jarvis et al. (2013. Influence of soil, land use and climatic factors on the hydraulic conductivity of soil. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 17(12), 5185-5195), who found that climate variables were better correlated with K than soil properties. OTIM (Open Tension-disk Infiltrometer Meta-database) builds on this database, adding 577 new data entries collated from 48 additional peer-reviewed scientific publications. OTIM contains more detailed information on local climate as well as land use and management.
On behalf of Micarna SA, Agroscope analysed the environmental impacts of beef, pork and poultry production. With beef production, feed intensity was crucial. In the case of pork and poultry production, the quantity of feed used per kg of meat had the greatest influence on environmental impacts. The use of European soya with its shorter transport distances had a positive effect.