Project Leader: Prof. Dr. Joachim Aurbacher, Institute of Farm and Agribusiness Management, Junior Professorship of Agricultural Production Economics, Justus Liebig University Giessen

Funding period: 2015-2018

Climate change will not only challenge agricultural producers to adapt their farm organisation and production planning, but also encourage adjustments to annual work scheduling.

These effects will be examined through a bio-economic simulation model that integrates the crop model system EXPERTN with the economic decision-making functionality of FarmActor.

Short-term management decisions are heuristically simulated to respond to atmospheric, soil condition and crop growth thresholds or “triggers” in a way that considers experiential learning by economic agents. This makes it possible to replicate the close relationships between the environment, crop performance and farm management.

Special attention is paid to studying “embedded risk” which represents the flexibility of possible human reactions to evolving uncertain economic and environmental conditions over time. By way of systematic sensitivity analysis using a random Latin-square sampling procedure, a data base for meta-modelling will facilitate the examination of the fundamental model structure. For this, the model will be driven by weather data provided in the Research Unit.

A Bayesian network will be calibrated via sensitivity results to assist in further analysis. Through this, production decisions will be optimised, a step for which the simulation model would be too complex. Further, this enables the engagement of stakeholders with field-level simulations in order to test the plausibility of model results.

Finally, simplified management rules will be transferred to the integrated land-use models, enabling them to integrate short-term decisions based on existing model data such as weather and crop data. Simulated future weather scenarios will then be utilised to forecast the effects of climate change on arable lands in Europe.

Phase 1: Microeconomic analysis of land use management under climate change with emphasis on risk and learning (Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Stephan Dabbert/Hohenheim and Prof. Dr. Joachim Aurbacher/Giessen; funding period: 2012-2015)