THE LIVING AGROECOLOGICAL LABORATORIES IN ROMANIA. CASE STUDY — ECOLOGICAL VINEYARD FROM SCDVV MURFATLAR

Auro­ra RANCA¹, Ion TONCEA^2
1STATIUNEA DE CERCETARE-DEZVOLTARE PENTRU VITICULTURA SI VINIFICATIE MURFATLAR
²ASOCIATIA ROMANA PENTRU AGRICULTURA DURABILA – ARAD
Cor­re­spond­ing author e‑mail: auro­raran­ca @ yahoo.com
Abstract: With­in the Era-NET Core Organ­ic — ALL project (Agroe­col­o­gy Liv­ing Labs to pro­mote robust and resilient Organ­ic pro­duc­tion sys­tems) in the peri­od 2021–2022 in Mur­fat­lar, an inno­v­a­tive sys­tem of eco­log­i­cal cul­ti­va­tion of grapevines was exper­i­ment­ed, aim­ing to by increas­ing the bio­di­ver­si­ty of the viti­cul­tur­al ecosys­tem to improve envi­ron­men­tal, eco­nom­ic and social fac­tors. The degree of health of the plants was mon­i­tored, car­ry­ing out phy­tosan­i­tary treat­ments only upon warn­ing. In this way, the fre­quen­cy of treat­ments was reduced by up to 40%. With the help of the DEX­iPM mul­ti­fac­to­r­i­al mod­el that allows the eval­u­a­tion of the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the cul­ture sys­tem accord­ing to sev­er­al objec­tives, they were com­par­a­tive­ly eval­u­at­ed. the inno­v­a­tive sys­tem of increas­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty com­pared to the clas­sic one, in the eco­log­i­cal vine­yard from Mur­fat­lar. All three pil­lars of sus­tain­abil­i­ty: eco­nom­ic, social and envi­ron­men­tal were improved when using the inno­v­a­tive sys­tem. We men­tion in par­tic­u­lar, the increase in farm­ers’ “job sat­is­fac­tion” (from medi­um to high) despite the increased “oper­a­tional dif­fi­cul­ties” of the pro­posed tech­niques. The envi­ron­men­tal impact of inter­crop­ping on wine plan­ta­tions is a vari­able fac­tor that strict­ly depends on the cli­mate and the area where the wine crops are locat­ed. It should not be over­looked that inter­crop­ping can com­pete for resources with vines, both for water and nutri­ent uptake. From an eco­nom­ic point of view, the “real prof­itabil­i­ty” of the sys­tem is increased from low to medi­um, while the “via­bil­i­ty” of the sys­tem is not changed by the intro­duced inno­va­tion.
Key­words: viti­cul­ture, sus­tain­abil­i­ty, envi­ron­men­tal, eco­nom­ic, social impact.
JEL clas­si­fi­ca­tion: Q01, Q16, Q57