Developing agricultural land use strategies appropriate to nature conservation goals and environmental protection

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a method that includes explicit aims of both nature conservation and environmental protection in the management strategies of agricultural systems. Following methods of land use planning and farming systems analysis a decision support system was developed to simulate site specific cropping practices and assess the impacts on natural resources. The optimization of farm income under defined restrictions of nature conservation and environmental protection completes the decision support system. The paper presents the general modelling approach and elaborates as an example the modelling of cropping practices. Cropping systems are modified to protect amphibians as a typical group of endangered organisms in agricultural landscapes. Evaluation tools are presented to assess the impact of defined production techniques on indicators of sustainable land use. The indicators are nitrate leaching, impact of land use on amphibians and gross margin of the crop production. The implementation of the evaluation tools on the land use of a model farm in northeast Germany is presented. Spatial allocation of target values is presented for one crop as an example. The site specific comparative advantages of the different cropping systems with regard to the indicators provide a basis for integration and optimization of a set of goals into land use practices on a larger scale, e.g., an agricultural landscape.