EIP-Agri Seminar

Healthy soils for Europe: sustainable management through knowledge and practice.

Healthy soils are fundamental to the  sustainable production  of food, feed  and fibre. In addition, healthy soils  provide many other functions that contribute to human well-being such as water filtering, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling and biodiversity conservation. Soil health is affected by unsustainable management  practices. This includes  frequent tillage, which accelerates soil organic  matter loss, incorrect use of agrochemicals, which leads to soil and water pollution, and irrigation practices causing salinisation problems.

Climate  change  may also  affect soils  in  different ways.  More frequent  heavy  rainfalls  and drought  periods  can increase erosion, nutrient and pollutant leaching, soil carbon losses and soil salinisation.  On the positive side, practices improving  soil health can mitigate or even reverse these negative effects, including the impacts of climate change.

The specific objectives of the seminar are:

• Raise awareness of the importance of soil health and introduce various EU initiatives undertaken to preserve it, such as EJP soil and the proposed EU mission “Caring for Soil is Caring for Life”.
• Promote and build upon the results and outcomes of past EIP-AGRI networking activities such as Focus Groups on soil-related issues and relevant workshops.
• Share experiences and good practices to maintain soil health, identified by relevant projects, research activities and farmers.
• Identify synergies between different types of projects working on soil health and encourage further cooperation among participants through networking.
• Discuss challenges and solutions for soil health, and identify what is needed to make these solutions operational for farmers, foresters and other land managers, and make them widely used/adopted.