Soil pioneers 2050: Lighthouse farms as innovatiors for climate change mitigating and soil health improving management systems to achieve the Green Deal targets.

As part of the Green Deal, agriculture faces the challenge of climate neutrality by reducing emissions and sequestering carbon in soils. Within the EU Soil Strategy ecosystem functions of healthy soils contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation should be achieved. However, currently there are hardly any realistic implementation strategies for these goals within crop production. As a new approach, the EU “Mission Soil Health” defines lighthouse farms as innovation drivers for achieving the climate and soil goals of the Green Deal. In the project SoilPioneers 2050, a national network of lighthouse farms is being set up at 60 locations, covering the most important soil and climate types as well as farming types in Austria. Modern scientific instruments are established on-farm to specifically monitor the soil functions of climate protection, nutrient efficiency, erosion protection and climate change adaptation. The potential for optimizing soil health through regenerative and agroecological practices compared to current agricultural state-of-the art systems, particularly with regard to efficient carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, is recorded through comprehensive soil indicator assessment. Based on the measured indicators, a soil quality model is developed that quantifies the management advance achieved for the individual soil functions and supports the farmers in further management optimization. A new platform will be used to process satellite data for soil organic matter balancing and assessment of crop resilience to heat/drought stress. By integrating crop-based remote sensing data into the soil quality model, the soil function assessment is improved and linked to progress made in climate change adaptation of crop production within the lighthouse farm network. Based on the improvements recorded in soil organic matter formation, nutrient and water efficiency as well as crop resilience achieved by the lighthouse farms, new simulation models will be used to develop improved estimates of climate and soil protection potentials through management innovation in arable farming within the framework of the Green Deal goals and future climate scenarios. By integrating innovative agricultural practice and research in a lighthouse farmer network, the project offers practical management solutions for the national implementation of the Green Deal goals, thereby also providing an important Europe-wide exemple for future-oriented climate action in agriculture.