Long-Term Trials – What We Can Read Between the Lines
Agroscope maintains and supervises several long-term trials in Switzerland to enable the investigation of longer-term changes in soil quality and in the soil functions that depend on these.
Long-term trials are conducted over several decades in order to gain an understanding of slowly unfolding processes that take place over these periods of time and cannot be evaluated in shorter trial periods. The experimental plots are managed with various approaches in order to determine how agricultural management practices such as crop-rotation, fertilisation, tillage, field traffic or farming system influence soil quality and soil functions over the long term, as well as whether side-effects for other ecosystem components are involved. This is the precondition for the proper assessment of the impacts of slowly unfolding processes and for ensuring that management practices are truly sustainable.