Precision Technologies and Novel Farming Practices to Reduce Chemical Inputs in Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Current food production model generates some air, water, and soil pollution, contributing to the loss of biodiversity, climate change, and resource depletion. The sustainability of agriculture is a key point to feed human population in the future. Nowadays, it depends on the large use of chemical and non-chemical inputs such as plant protection products (PPP) and fertilizers.

PPP spray application is recognized worldwide as one of the agricultural practices that has a high impact on the environment and human health mainly due to the losses (e.g., spray drift and in-field out of target losses), exposure, and total amount of products used during the whole crop growing season. The risks related to human health during spray application involve operators, bystanders, and resident people, whereas risks to the environment involve water, soil, and atmosphere quality, and non-target organisms such as vertebrates, useful arthropods, and other invertebrates. Also fertilizers, both mineral and organic ones, represent a potential source of environmental pollution when managed improperly and applied with unsustainable machineries and techniques. Both groundwater and the atmosphere can be affected due to nitrates leaching and gaseous losses, respectively. Ammonia emission as well as nitrogen losses in the form of nitrous oxide are the major concerns.

Nowadays, the equation of high efficacious/efficient agricultural practices and reduced hazardous inputs could be concurrently balanced by adopting the most appropriate and innovative technologies to reduce the inputs at source by also giving preference to the most efficient agricultural practices.

A tailored and integrated crop protection and nutrition management, adopting new technologies and applications of biological products is needed to make possible a more sustainable agriculture, reducing the dependency on chemical PPPs and fertilizers while maintaining the pest and disease control efficacy as well as the nutrition benefits for the crop. The wide range of existing agronomic scenarios makes the sustainability of agronomic practices very challenging. Each scenario is characterized by specific crops, pest/diseases, agronomical practices, soil characteristics, nutrient requirements, and meteorological and geographic conditions.

This Special Issue aims at collecting original contributions on recent efforts and advances in i) innovative technologies and techniques for phytosanitary products and fertilizer applications based on precision agriculture principles (e.g., Variable Rate Application technologies for both PPP and fertilizers, canopy characterization, site specific weed control), ii) innovative agricultural practices (e.g., organic farming, integrated crop management) and iii) novel products for pest control (e.g., bio-PPP) and organic fertilization (e.g., organo-mineral fertilizers from animal manure, digestate). Advances shall have the final goal of consistently reduce the hazardous chemical inputs promoting biodiversity in a wide range of agronomic scenarios like arable crops (e.g., cereals), 3D crops (e.g., orchards, vineyards, citrus, olives), horticultural crops (e.g., potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage) and greenhouse-protected crops (e.g., tomato, pepper). All these technologies, techniques, and practices should also be sustainable from the socio-economic point of view. Furthermore, the sustainability of the agriculture also needs good training programs to transfer all the existing knowledge to stakeholders, first of all farmers and advisers; therefore, contributions on this topic are also welcome.

The topics of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following:

• Airflow variable rate application
• Alternated use of chemicals and biological products for crop protection and nutrition
• Canopy characterization
• Canopy spray deposition measurements
• Canopy spray coverage measurements
• Evaluation of bio-pesticides efficacy
• Evaluation of drift mitigation measures
• Evaluation of pesticide and/or fertilizer savings
• Evaluation of spray quality including droplet size spectra measurements
• Fertilizers variable rate application
• Green manure approaches
• In-field spray losses reducing
• Intercropping
• Modeling of spray and airflow patterns
• New organic fertilizers
• Nitrogen approaches
• Novel methods for solid/liquid manure application
• Pesticide spray optimization
• PPP and fertilizers dose adjustment
• Reduction of nitrogen losses in the environment
• Remote sensing for precision PPP or fertilizers application
• Sprayer airflow adjustment
• Spray drift reducing technologies
• Spray mixture variable rate application
• Technologies allowing precision agriculture including sensors
• Training programs to reduce the use of pesticides and the fertilization

Dr. Marco Grella
Prof. Dr. Fabrizio Stefano Gioelli
Dr. Paolo Marucco
Dr. Jordi Llop Casamada
Guest Editors

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