Agriculture has the potential to move from being a driver of climate change to being part of the solution. Cooperation between research and business is needed to develop this potential. It is precisely this cooperation that the Society for Energy and Climate Protection Schleswig-Holstein GmbH (EKSH) promotes. It is therefore no coincidence that the non-profit EKSH, together with the Lübeck University of Applied Sciences (TH Lübeck) and Westhof Bio-Gemüse GmbH & Co. KG, visited the Futterkamp teaching and testing center of the Schleswig-Holstein Chamber of Agriculture. In the future, all four institutions will work together to achieve more climate-friendly agriculture by researching, working in partnership or supporting.
After a brief welcome, Dr. Ole Lamp, head of the cattle husbandry department at the SH Chamber of Agriculture, goes straight to the point: “Global and German agriculture is a significant source of greenhouse gases. In addition to the gases from animal digestion, there are also indirect emissions in other countries, which are caused by the import of animal feed, as well as significant emissions from the production of fertilizers and the production and combustion of fuels analyze the primary energy requirements of the products.
agriculture of the future
In the future, the TH Lübeck will therefore research what post-fossil agriculture could look like. FARMfuture is the name of the new research project, which is intended to demonstrate how agricultural energy and material flow management can be used to dispense with fossil energy and thus make a positive contribution to reducing greenhouse gases in agriculture. A large organic vegetable farm of the Westhof Bio-Gemüse Group and the conventional dairy cattle and forage farm of the Schleswig-Holstein Chamber of Agriculture serve as examples.
“From our point of view, agriculture is predestined for the use of renewable energies,” explains Professor Maximilian Schüler from the Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, “in the project we want to calculate on the farms involved what an operational energy supply can look like without fossil fuels and we are focusing on improving the Energy efficiency through an intelligent combination of innovative energy consumers and energy stores. In the end, we want to show what agriculture of the future in Schleswig-Holstein could look like.”