INTEGRATED AGRICULTURE IN WESTERN-EUROPE - RESEARCHERS EXPERIENCE AND LIMITATIONS

Integrated agriculture for arable farming systems has been developed and tested during the last decades in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. For several years similar initiatives were taken in five other European countries in fruit or vegetable productions as well as in dairy or arable farms. In these studies several methodological ways were explored. In this paper the state of the art and some perspectives of I.F.S.-research in Western Europe are presented. It appears that European researchers tend more and more to carry out experiments directly at the commercial farm level to develop and test integrated fanning systems (I.F.S.), and they gradually give up the comparisons between integrated and conventional farming systems. If I.F.S. were used successfully in arboriculture for many years, the improvement of such methods in other farming systems (arable, mixed, dairy) needs specific researches: to define appropriate indicators, to evaluate the degree of achievement of the different objectives of I.F.S., and, to develop operational farming system models.