Project

How is the size of a crop product affected by field design and crop characteristics?

Within the new project CropMix we study how crop diversity (e.g. strip intercropping) in the field can benefit from ecological processes. While the benefits of more diversity in a field have been shown for yield quantity, yield quality is as important for farmers. In this specific MSc project we consider the size of a crop product (e.g. cabbage head) as a yield quality aspect and use 3D plant modelling to explore the how crop size is affected by field design and crop characteristics.

Project description

The agricultural sector and an interdisciplinary national research team are joining forces in the CropMix project to achieve a breakthrough in the transition to sustainable arable farming. We study how crop diversity (strip intercropping and crop rotations) in the field can benefit from ecological processes. While intercropping can provide more efficient use of nutrients and sunlight to promote plant growth, and can enhance pest and disease suppression to collectively increase crop yield, farmers still have many questions.

One important questions for farmers includes the consistent crop quality together with the crop quantity. Depending on the crop product, quality can simply be the protein content (e.g. for grains) or the size of the vegetable (e.g. for cabbage). While ecologist have often used total yield biomass as ton per hectare as performance measure, this is not always suitable for farmers. Farmers may be interested in lower yield biomass distributed over a more constant product size instead of higher biomass yield distributed over products that vary greatly in size. However, it remains unclear how crop product distribution is affected by intercropping design or crop traits.

Objectives and methods

This study aims to quantify the effects of cropping design and crop traits on the distribution of crop products compared to crop yield biomass. We will be using functional structural plant (FSP) models as tool, as this can simulate a large range of cropping designs and crop traits and provides crop yield output in specific individual products per plant.

Expectations

Set clear research questions, search data in literature, parameterize and calibrate model settings, create a virtual experiment that can answer the research question.

Required skills

Interest in coding, useful to have some experience in coding such as Java or R but no need.

Types of research / work

We offer the interested MSc student to work together with a postdoc to use FSP modelling to explore the effects of stripping design and crop traits on crop yield quality compared to quantity. We use information from literature and from previous conducted experiments to parametrize the model and perform virtual cropping simulations as experiments. Depending on the season you can help collect data in the field, but no need, this can be a full computer based project.