An online toolbox for cover crops and living mulches

Cover crops and living mulches form an integral component of conservation agriculture promoting soil health and minimising external inputs. The OSCAR Project (Optimising Subsidiary Crop Applications in Rotation) aims to improve practices of conservation agriculture in farming systems across Europe. The principal output of the project is to develop a toolbox to make technical and scientific information publically available to farmers, researchers, and other stakeholders. The continually evolving toolbox is currently available online at www.covercrops.eu and will consist of three facets (1) An interactive user-fed wiki providing information on subsidiary crops species and machinery use with links to published literature; (2) A searchable database on subsidiary crops and technology. This will detail climatic and soil specific plant traits and will form a decision support tool to aid choices of subsidiary crops; (3) A discussion forum will also facilitate the exchange of information between farmers, researchers and stakeholders on conservation agricultural systems across European countries.