A simple yet reliable system to support fertilisation decision making at farm level

Agriculture, and so the cultivation of wheat as well, is increasingly affected by the effects of climate change, with repercussions on vegetative growth, phenology, as well as yields. This is worsen by a greater uncertainty related to the variability of the climate, which is complicating the decisions to be taken by sector operators (Iizumi et al. 2018). In this context, farmers are experiencing increasing difficulties to comply on the one hand with the qualitative and quantitative standards, as required by the agro-food chain, or by the industrial sector, and on the other to preserve the environment and, last but not least, their own revenue. In recent years, thanks to the development of new technologies, the proliferation of internet-related services, the increased and greater availability of computational capacity, as well as the spread of smartphones and tablets, decision support systems are spreading in agriculture. However, if on the one hand they are often having high complexity and reliability, such systems require large amounts of information, being highly time and energy consuming for the farmer, who often does not complete the process. For these reasons we have created an extremely simple system, which requires very little, known information from the farmer, but is able to provide useful, reliable and effective information for the user. The system integrates a mechanistic crop growth simulation model (SSM-Wheat, Soltani et al. 2013), weather generators (LARS-WG, Semenov & Barrow 1997), algorithms for NDVI calculation and nitrogen withdrawal.