FOOTWAYS for farmers' cooperatives and extension advisers

The advice provided to agricultural professionals has evolved significantly over the last few years, attaching more and more importance to environmental matters. This reinforcement of environmental considerations has been hampered in the field by the lack of software tools which can support decisions effectively with regard to pesticides. One of the problems encountered is the fact that traditional methods used to assess the likely transfer of pesticides to adjacent water resources are based exclusively on expert judgement and are hence largely subjective and qualitative.

The European project FOOTPRINT, which was conceived and coordinated by the FOOTWAYS founder, developed a series of computer tools relying on recent research findings to allow farming professionals across Europe to evaluate the likely losses of pesticide from fields and inputs into water resources. However, the fact that the tools had to be developed for all EU countries meant that simplifications in the methodology had to be made and underlying databases (especially the climate zonation) are not as highly resolved as possible, limiting the applicability of the tools for some contexts.

FOOTWAYS has improved the FOOTPRINT methodology to address the shortcomings listed above. FOOTWAYS has developed FOOTWAYS Pro and FOOTWAYS Sp which allow all local data (including local climate) to be integrated in the environmental risk assessments carried out. These tools were designed to address the needs of all agricultural professionals and allow:

1. the identification of water and pesticide transfer pathways in the landscape
2. the quantification of inputs into water resources of each pesticide used
3. the provision of advice regarding how to limit environmental transfer.

Environmental risk assessments which are undertaken inside the FOOTWAYS tools take into account all specificities of agricultural production, i.e. meteorology, soil type, crop type and development, compounds used, application dates, application rates. They rely on the best pesticide fate models available, which have been validated over the last 20 years.

The FOOTWAYS tools are truly management and decision support tools in that they can be used to assess the influence of modifications to agricultural practices on pesticide losses.

The FOOTWAYS tools can be adapted to integrate into existing decision support systems or to make use of existing agricultural databases.

FOOTWAYS Pro, an online risk assessment platform, clearly represents the state of the art and is designed for risk specialists and risk managers. FOOTWAYS Pro is the ideal tool for extension advisers who want to carefully assess the likely influence of changes in practices, to identify those compounds and situations which may lead to significant losses, to evaluate pesticide concentrations in seepage, drainage and runoff waters. FOOTWAYS Sp provides access to modelling predictions which were generated previously. FOOTWAYS Sp is ideally suited to a deployment in farms by extension advisers and farmers since they provide results of risk assessments almost instantly. FOOTWAYS Pro and FOOTWAYS Sp are key tools towards the objective of reaching a sustainable agriculture.

You can use FOOTWAYS Sp and FOOTWAYS Pro to:

• identify combinations of environmental conditions / practices / products which are likely to lead to pesticide losses from fields (and those which do not)
• come up with robust suggestions to limit transfers where risks have been identified
• evaluate the performance of farmers with regard to the protection of water resources
• establish incentives towards a sustainable agriculture
• bring added value to the databases you may have put together
• provide field-specific advice to farmers.

If you wish to know more about the tools or which of the two tools is more suited to your specific situation, please contact us at