- to contribute to our understanding of effects of organic production methods on the environment and on quality of vegetables, and to contribute to development of new and more sustainable organic production systems.
Preliminary results
The results obtained until now have shown the possibilities for development of the organic production methods towards systems with much less dependence on animal manure and with an increased diversity in the form of autumn cover crops and intercropping.
The results show that the use of pesticides and fungicides in the conventional system does not systematically lead to a reduced level of pest and disease damage on the products. Also among the three organic systems we have found surprisingly small differences in yield, quality, taste, and content of secondary compounds and minerals.
All together the results indicate that it will be possible to develop more sustainable organic crop production systems without loosing yield or crop quality. In the traditional organic system the N input from manure/fertilizer is reduced to 60% of the input used in conventional production, in the two others it is reduced to only 20%, and almost similar differences were observed in the risk of nitrate leaching loss. However, the crop yield was practically the same in these systems.
We have tried to employ a new technique as proteomic analysis for studying quality of the vegetables produced, and we have found that this can lead to exiting new results on the basic reaction of the plants to the growth conditions they have in the organic and conventional cropping systems.
