All try to make a less intense use of external inputs, to save on energy and cost.
Regardless of the sever soil degradation, the use of external inputs to maintain soil fertility for increasing malting barley production is still low.
The least intense use of external inputs comes with natural drying, which relies exclusively on the moisture gradient between wood and ambient air.
Since the 1970s, winter wheat management in France has focused on growing high-yielding cultivars with the intensive use of external inputs.
Legumes could also be competitive crops and, due to their environmental and socioeconomic benefits, could be introduced in modern cropping systems to increase crop diversity and reduce use of external inputs.
Cover crops can reduce the use of external inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers and can at the same time suppress weeds as well as improve and maintain soil fertility.
Legumes could be competitive crops, in terms of environmental and socioeconomic benefits, with potential to be introduced in modern cropping systems, which are characterized by a decreasing crop diversity [24, 80] and an excessive use of external inputs (i.e. fertilizers and agrochemicals).
Kinetic models can quantitatively capture the experimentally observed regulation data of metabolic systems and are often used to find the optimal manipulation of external inputs.
Intensification of the farm management in terms of animal feed inputs is reflected in higher consumption of external inputs (feedstuffs), reduction or cessation of using grazing resources or else reduction of the grazing time period.
Assuming no resource constraints, changes in the current farm systems were introduced stepwise, as both intensification of external input use (fertilisers and fodder) and qualitative changes in the configuration of the farms (i.e. changing land use towards fodder production, improving manure handling and/or changing cattle breeds).
