Comparative evaluation of viticultural systems: impacts on yield, plant protection, and resource efficiency

Abstract

The focus on sustainability and climate change emphasises the need to compare cultivation systems based on their economic, ecological and productive characteristics. This study looks at the comparison of integrated and organic viticulture based on agronomic parameters and examines yield differences, the use of resources and machine work in terms of the number and sum of crossings. The data were collected from wineries as part of this project. The results show a higher yield variance in the organic cultivation system, while the yields of the integrated cultivation system are on average lower than those of the organic cultivation system. The analysis of machine work shows clear differences in terms of the machines used and the number of applications. A comparison of diesel consumption shows that although organic cultivation has a higher total number of cultivation operations, it has a lower average diesel consumption compared to integrated viticulture. The case study by Borsato et al. (2020) concludes that organic viticulture is a way of successfully combining economic and environmental factors with regard to water pollution and soil compaction.

The second part of this study compares agronomic parameters within the organic cultivation system by year. Here, the amount of yield shows a large annual variance, which is linked to the different external environmental conditions. The annual average shows significant differences. Here, too, the total number of crossings is linked to diesel consumption. The number of plant protection applications correlates with the amount of copper applied per hectare. With regard to the amount of sulphur applied per hectare, the data only show a greater variance between years. The comparison of different cultivation systems and their effects on soil parameters has already been investigated in Hendgen et al. (2020). Our data can contribute further to this. The regression analysis of the yield of the organic farming system in relation to the number of poles per hectare does not show a clear trend. The same applies to the comparison between plant density and number of poles per hectare, regardless of cultivation system and year. Further research is needed to investigate the dependence of the cultivation system and the existing poles on their terrestrial ecotoxicity in terms of heavy metal release into the soil (Owsianiak et al., 2015). With our data, we want to provide an insight into practical data on resource use and highlight the effects on soil and terroir.

References

Borsato, E., Zucchinelli, M., D’Ammaro, D., Giubilato, E., Zabeo, A., Criscione, P., Pizzol, L., Cohen, Y., Tarolli, P., Lamastra, L., & Marinello, F. (2020). Use of multiple indicators to compare sustainability performance of organic vs conventional vineyard management. Science of The Total Environment, 711, 135081. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135081

Hendgen, M., Döring, J., Stöhrer, V., Schulze, F., Lehnart, R., & Kauer, R. (2020). Spatial Differentiation of Physical and Chemical Soil Parameters under Integrated, Organic, and Biodynamic Viticulture. Plants, 9(10), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9101361

Owsianiak, M., Holm, P. E., Fantke, P., Christiansen, K. S., Borggaard, O. K., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2015). Assessing comparative terrestrial ecotoxicity of Cd, Co, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn: The influence of aging and emission source. Environmental Pollution, 206, 400–410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2015.07.025