Using FADN to derive cropping scheme distribution in Italy

International audienceArable land is a major component both in landscape and in the food production system. The ability to understand and describe how spatial and dynamical characters affect human life and eventually to design the agricultural systems beyond the processes ruling them is fundamental to preserve land and ensure economic, ecological and social sustainability. In this paper, we will refer to cropping scheme as a general term merging two aspects of cropping systems, the spatial and the temporal one, represented respectively in terms of crop pattern and crop rotation. Analysis of crop rotations is of basic importance in sustainable farming strategies dealing with climate change, food security and organic farming. In fact, crop rotations are fundamental to maintaining fertility and, even if their analysis often focus on local crops, they help face market and weather uncertainties as well as interpret landscape diversity and its dynamics (Dury et al., 2012, Thenail et al. 2009). In European Community (EC) an agricultural holding database standard has been developed, the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), which is seldom rich in information on farm management techniques. The present study makes use of Italian FADN to identify more recurrent crop patterns and evaluate the possibility to describe them as a crop rotation [...