An applied farming systems approach to infer conservation-relevant agricultural practices for agri-environment policy design

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has shown difficulties in meeting its environmental objectives, namely in supporting biodiversity-friendly farming systems that remain under pressure to intensify or abandon. Proposals to address this have ranged from increasing the focus on highly tailored and targeted agri-environment schemes, to promoting broad-brush policies such as those recently implemented in the Greening of the CAP. Both options have been criticised due to questionable cost-effectiveness. Alternatives based on agri-environment policies oriented to support conservation-relevant farming systems have been suggested, but they have faced operational difficulties related primarily to obtaining the necessary data to define farming system typologies. Here we investigated whether a simplified approach based on a coarse farming system typology built from incomplete data on land-use and livestock, such as that available in CAP paying agencies, could be used to infer on a wider range of conservation-relevant farm management practices and, ultimately, to select the farming systems qualifying for premium payments. Based on data collected by a farm-survey on a High Nature Value farmland area in southern Portugal, we show that some farming systems are consistently associated with conservation-relevant practices related to the use of herbicides, stubble grazing, creation of wildlife plots and early cereal harvest. The traditional system involving the rotational production of cereals and sheep grazing on fallows showed the most favourable balance of land uses and farm management practices with positive conservation effects. Results underlined the potential of farming systems as a framework for developing agri-environment policy.