Fertirrigere V2.11: A multi-target DSS to manage water and nutrient supply at macrozone level

Cropping systems have become more complex. Environmental laws reduce crop profitability; water saving strategies are hard to manage at the farm level; reducing non-point pollution from agricultural systems requires an integrated approach to plant nutrition and careful management of high-tech fertigation systems. Technicians, and farmers must have easy-to-use, precise tools to assist them in fulfilling environmental and economic constraints. Nowadays, even in the more developed countries, computer skills of technicians and farmers range widely. As a consequence, the diffusion of a computer based decision support system must face several levels of user's competence. Moreover, reliable soil physical and chemical characteristics and meteorological data are often not widely available across an irrigation district. To cope with these problems and ensure the largest diffusion of a sustainable approach to water and nutrient management, a multi-target tool, able to give answers with increasing precision levels (from an optimised balance sheet method to a daily dynamic fertigation approach), was developed.