Latest Projects

Research project (§ 26 & § 27)
Duration : 2024-02-19 - 2025-08-18

Energy costs, particularly in the form of electricity, are playing an increasingly important economic role on farms due to the rise in energy prices. As electricity prices will remain at a higher level in the future, but above all become more volatile than before, the economic price risk for farms is increasing. On the other hand, security of supply has increasingly become the focus of social discourse. Due to Austria's high dependency on imported energy sources, this leads to an increasing risk in the security of supply. One form of risk management can be to make the farm as energy self-sufficient as possible. The possibilities for this have become more diverse due to the further development of renewable energy technologies and the investment decision for farms is often associated with great economic uncertainty. This project aims to evaluate the technologies available on the market (in the field of solar power production, storage and use) and operational development paths (flexibilisation measures in efficiency and load management) with regard to energy self-sufficiency from a technical and economic perspective and to survey their acceptance among farm managers. In addition to surveys on motives for such investment decisions and attitudes towards energy self-sufficiency and risk perception, high-resolution energy simulation and business risk assessment models will be developed and applied to typical farms in Austrian agriculture. From this, an Excel tool will be developed to support the work of agricultural advisors and thus make a significant contribution to the development of more sustainable structures in agriculture.
Research project (§ 26 & § 27)
Duration : 2022-09-01 - 2025-08-31

Against this background the overall objective of D4AgEcol is to identify the appropriate digital tools and technologies for the transition to agroecological farming systems and suggest measures to adapt and exploit their potentials to the transition to sustainable food and agricultural systems. The project is driven by the vision of the rapid digitalisation of agriculture, which strengthens the agricultural sector. However, in order to capitalize the potentials of agroecology, policy intervention is necessary to enable the implementation of digital tools, which foster agroecological systems. D4AgEcol will provide a balanced assessment of relevant digital tools and technologies for multiple farming systems, while considering its impacts on the agroecology. In addition, potential trade-offs, and concerns of stakeholders and citizens will be identified. Necessary policy interventions will be demonstrated in national and European roadmaps for promoting agroecology with digitalisation in the EU and more detailed in seven European regions covering the broad spectrum of European agricultural farming systems in the most relevant pedo-climatic zones. The results of this project will be relevant for farmers, stakeholders, and policy makers at different scales - from regional to national and European level. The benefits for farmers and stakeholders will be to identify promising digital tools and technologies in their environment. For policy makers information about necessary policy frameworks and potentials for policy interventions will be useful to develop the digitalisation as an enabler of agroecology in Europe.
Research project (§ 26 & § 27)
Duration : 2021-04-01 - 2022-04-30

The project serves to further develop the core competencies of the participating research groups in the field of research into innovative concepts/control mechanisms for sustainable agricultural production, taking into account climate and soil protection. In particular, the project investigates how improved climate and soil protection can be implemented via result-oriented control mechanisms. The project will develop feasible concepts for the potential design of such approaches. Following this objective, the research questions are: Which result-oriented approaches exist and how can these approaches be transferred to the protected goods under investigation? Which target indicators can represent outcome-based provision and which area targets are potentially achievable? How can indicators be operationalized, captured, and measured on farms? The purpose of the assignment is to gain new insights into outcome-based approaches to the provision of soil and climate public goods by agriculture. The research questions will be addressed in a generally valid and reproducible manner through the application of scientific methods (e.g., literature review, farm manager/expert interviews). It is planned to publish the results of the work scientifically; this ensures that the knowledge generated within the framework of this contract is made available to the scientific community in the best possible way for the purposes of teaching and research and, if necessary, to the public (third mission), as long as there are no reasons worthy of consideration in individual contracts that prevent this.

Supervised Theses and Dissertations