Volume 72 (2021): Issue 1 (March 2021)

In keeping of breeding sows, it is important to use the working time as efficiently as possible to ensure economics within legal production conditions. This can be supported by providing working time requirement data. Therefore, the aim of this study was to generate working time requirement of current group keeping systems in the waiting area of breeding sows. For this purpose, in the keeping systems for small groups with feeding bay and large groups with retrieval station, data was collected using mobile video technology and semi-standardized questionnaires at four farms with current technology. With the gained data, operating models were created under optimized conditions in order to display the working time requirement of work processes for different stock sizes. Both keeping systems differed significantly from each other in the total working time requirement over different stock sizes. The total working time requirement in the waiting area with a typical herd size of 140 breeding sows of Austrian growing farms was 3.58 MPh/sow/year for the small group and 2.68 MPh/sow/year for the large group. The comparison of the available results with data from previous studies indicated the trend of decrease in working hours per sow and year. This was due to technical progress which enabled larger herd sizes.

In addition to soil structure and pore function disturbances, the impairments of natural soil functions on line construction sites (e. g. power cable routing) also include changes in the site-specific variable thermal-hydraulic properties in the area of the line trenches. Based on the pore size distribution values as a function of dry bulk density classes compiled in German Soil Classification system “KA5” (Ad-Hoc-AG-Boden, 2005), volumetric heat capacity (C), thermal conductivity (λ), and thermal diffusivity (k) can be calculated using the model of Xie et al. (2018). These calculated data are presented for the soil texture spectrum according to KA5, as well for selected textures (Sl3, Lt2, Tu3) and class ranges of dry bulk density (ρ_t).

The typical curves for C (linear increase), λ (increasingly flattening increase) and k (increase with reversal to negative slope) and their rise with increasing ρt (1.1–1.7 g cm⁻³) are shown. k varies depending on the proportions of clay, silt and sand within the soil texture class. The curve shapes between low and high ρt differ more for “Sl3” than for the finer-grained texture class “Tu3”. With the help of these data sets, changes in the heat balance and the thermal- hydraulic soil properties can be predicted for line projects in the power grid expansion before the start of construction measures, if soil texture and dry bulk density are determined by field description methods.

In the H2020 project FATIMA (FArming Tools for external nutrient Inputs and water MAnagement) an integrated approach for the optimisation of nitrogen management in agriculture was applied. In addition to the technical component, which included the processing of Sentinel-2 satellite data, the socio-economic and agronomic aspects of improved nutrient management were investigated. The results show that farmers are mainly interested in timely application maps for variable-rate nitrogen application. In the course of the project not only a field trial for the validation of satellite data as a basis for an economic analysis was established, but also an online application for site-specific fertilisation based on current and historical satellite images was developed and tested.