Development of the Belgian prototypes

General context

Within the framework of the program GeoTraceAgri, the studies in Belgium are lead in the sectors of :

The choice of the animal and hay productions lies on the fact that certain extension services which act as project partners, and through them, groups of producers with which they work, tend to promote Integrated Farming methods into rural territories of high biologic and geographic interest.
Hay production represents the upstream of the animal production sector itself. This example should allow studying the inter-operability problems of the traceability systems set up for these two linked sectors

Besides, in Belgium, the cereal production sector is strongly concerned by the problem of the presence of mycotoxins in wheat. This is the base of a reflection on the development of an indicator to evaluate the risk of contamination in the field.

Elaboration of traceability indicators

Altogether, indicators developed by the CRA handle mainly problems connected to the management of the environment , vegetable productions quality and of health risk.

1) Intensification of animal productions

The current concerns relaying on the follow-up of restrictive conditions in particular zones (Natura 2000) subjected to measures intended to protect environment, in accordance with the population aspiration and the socio-economic development of the concerned territory. One of the aspects of these measures is the identification of sensitive zones in connection with the intensification of animal productions (water pollution, erosion of soils) to adapt as much as possible technical methods to environment abilities

To help producers in the daily management of their breeding effluents, the Belgian users group set up a system allowing encoding the data of the concerned farms. These data are used for the definition of specific indicators which aims are :

- To educate farmers to the sociological and economical risks of wrong activity management on environment ;
- To inform the population for the real risks linked to agricultural activities ;
- To give a clear and popular image to regional agriculture in particular to the breeders who manage a great part of the land and guarantee the quality of environment.

2) Hay quality

For a definite type of meadow, the production of a quality feed, independently of its botanical composition or its management technique depend on right climatic conditions during the drying. Indeed, these determine the duration of which the hay stays on the field. The duration of the drying period is also linked to the cutting date, the age of the plant at the time of cutting and its spatial localization (hillside, exposure). The consideration of these various elements allowed defining a specific hay quality indicator.

3) Risk of mycotoxins contamination in cereal production

The implementation of this traceability indicator constitutes the first step of a hierarchical control procedure allowing reducing in a reasoned way the number of sample analyses to detect the presence of mycotoxins. The risk of contamination is estimated for every field taking into account weather conditions during critical phases of cereal development and additional information about agronomical characteristics of the field.