Project
Sustainable use of water and soil in the Three lakes Region

The Bernese Seeland is considered Switzerland’s vegetable belt. The region faces significant economic and ecological challenges, as the agricultural sector must produce goods with fewer pesticides going forward while continuing to meet market demands. In addition, it must improve soil fertility, biodiversity as well as water use. In this project, existing resource-conserving approaches will be developed further, and future-oriented technologies will be tested in areas with drained organic soils (“peat soils”). With this project, we have different goals. The first one is to develop a Geodata platform, to support cross-farm and regional production planning, optimization of plant health, and reduced pesticide use. We also want to develop and test a local warning and forecasting system featuring interpolated weather data for specific crops. Additionally, we will investigate the influence of different tillage systems on the development and quality of vegetable crops; optimized use of recycled fertilizer; the impact of green manuring and soil cover systems on the development of selected pests; soil-conserving cultivation systems; and new approaches to promotion of plant health. Finally, we want to generate data by expanding the network of soil probes, and enable the adaptation of a German irrigation app to the local conditions in Switzerland. The app will be tested for accuracy and usability by Swiss vegetable producers. The water optimization potential in the Seeland region will be assessed for different soils and crops to provide a basis for large-scale modelling of irrigation needs in Switzerland.