Til Feike

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Julius Kühn-Institut

Wheat is a strategic crop for Iran with respect to food security and environmental impact. In the northeastern Golestan Province irrigated and rainfed wheat production systems co-exist. In the light of climate change the comparative assessment of the two systems regarding productivity and sustainability is of urgent importance. This paper aims to c...

Climate change has been recognized as a main driver in the increasing occurrence of extreme weather. Weather indices (WIs) are used to assess extreme weather conditions regarding its impact on crop yields. Designing WIs is challenging, since complex and dynamic crop-climate relationships have to be considered. As a consequence, geodata for WI calcu...

Climate protection is in the self-interest of agriculture due to the increasing negative effects of climate change on crop production. The effects of different crop protection strategies, the non-usage of fungicides, and reduced tillage were assessed regarding climate impact of wheat production based on a long-term field trial in Dahnsdorf in 2008-...

Key message Breeding progress of resistance to fungal wheat diseases and impact of disease severity on yield reduction in long-term variety trials under natural infection were estimated by mixed linear regression models. Abstract This study aimed at quantifying breeding progress achieved in resistance breeding towards varieties with higher yield a...

To combat China’s water crisis tremendous research efforts are undertaken aiming at the improvement of water management in cotton production, which is the major consumer of the scarce water resources in arid Northwestern China. In recent years extensive field experiment based research strongly enhanced the theoretical knowledge of optimal water man...

Accurate and efficient plant disease diagnosis is crucial for sustainable agriculture and global food security, as diseases significantly impact crop productivity. Despite advancements in deep learning, the performance and scalability of many models remain limited. This study addresses this gap by evaluating MobileViTv2, EfficientNet-B7, and a hybr...

Ensuring accurate predictions of wheat yield and nutritional content is vital for enhancing agricultural productivity and food security. This study aims to improve wheat yield prediction by integrating process-based models (PBM), machine learning (ML), and remote sensing (RS) techniques. Three Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DS...

Wheat’s nutritional value is critical for human nutrition and food security. However, more attention is needed, particularly regarding the content and concentration of iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn), especially in the context of climate change (CC) impacts. To address this, various controlled field experiments were conducted, involving the cultivation of...

Conservation agriculture practices of crop rotation with permanent soil cover have been widely promoted for improving long-term agroecosystem resilience in the face of changing climate. However, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of site-specific agroecosystem services of soil health and crop yield in response to improved crop rotations wit...

Supporting materials for article entitled "Do rotations with cover crops increase yield and soil organic carbon?—A modeling study in southwest Germany" Ahmed Attia⃰, Carsten Marohn, Ashifur Rahman Shawon, Arno de Kock, Jörn Strassemeyer, Til Feike Julius Kühn Institute (JKI)—Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, Institute for Strategies an...

Crop models are valuable tools for simulating and assessing genotype‐by‐environment interactions. In most studies, these models are parameterized based on crop data from a few sites and years, which often limits their applicability to a broader geographic context. Therefore, we utilize countrywide multi‐environment variety trial data in this study...

Estimating smallholder crop yields robustly and timely is crucial for improving agronomic practices, determining yield gaps, guiding investment, and policymaking to ensure food security. However, there is poor estimation of yield for most smallholders due to lack of technology, and field scale data, particularly in Egypt. Automated machine learning...

Estimating smallholder crop yields robustly and timely is crucial for improving agronomic practices, determining yield gaps, guiding investment, and policymaking to ensure food security. However, there is poor estimation of yield for most smallholders due to lack of technology, and field scale data, particularly in Egypt. Automated machine learning...

Der Trend hin zu einer pflanzenbasierten Ernährung und die wachsende Besorgnis über den Klimawandel hat zu einem steigenden Interesse an pflanzlichen Proteinalternativen gegenüber tierischen Milch- und Fleischprodukten geführt. Mit einem Anteil von 56% am gesamten Markt für pflanzliche Getränke ist der Haferdrink mit Abstand das beliebteste pflanzl...

Heat and drought are major abiotic stressors threatening cereal yields, but little is known regarding the spatio-temporal development of their yield-effects. In this study, we assess genotype (G) × environment (E) × management (M) specific weather-yield relations utilizing spatially explicit weather indices (WIs) and variety trial yield data of win...

Key message Grain yield and NUE increased over time while nitrogen yield did not drop significantly despite reduced nitrogen input. Selection for grain and nitrogen yield is equivalent to selection for NUE. Abstract Breeding and registration of improved varieties with high yield, processing quality, disease resistance and nitrogen use efficiency (...

Conservation agriculture practices of crop rotation with permanent soil cover have been widely promoted for improving long-term agroecosystem resilience in the face of changing climate. However, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of site-specific agroecosystem services of soil health and crop yield in response to improved crop rotations wit...

Introducing new crops that can thrive under changing climate conditions is crucial for sustainable agriculture. Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.) shows promise as a C4 crop due to its high heat and drought stress tolerance. Its deep root system may contribute to increased soil organic carbon, supporting climate change mitigation. However, one of the cha...

This document is the proposal for the consortium FAIRagro in the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) in Germany. The proposal was submitted to the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Nov 2021. The proposal was finally accepted with a revised working program in Feb 2023. All financial resources (personnel, material, direct...

Crop yields are increasingly affected by climate change-induced weather extremes in Germany. However, there is still little knowledge of the specific crop-climate relations and respective heat and drought stress-induced yield losses. Therefore, we configure weather indices (WIs) that differ in the timing and intensity of heat and drought stress in...

The authors present the goals and current work of the respective Task Areas. Special consideration is given to Use Case 3 ("Streamlining pest and disease data to advance integrated pest management"), the challenges, objectives, expected outcomes, and requirements for the various work areas in the consortium. In each Task Area, explicit reference wa...

Hydrothermal carbonization process via converting invasive plants into functional materials may provide a novel strategy to comprehensively control and utilized the exotic invasive plants. In this study, Eupatorium adenophorum was utilized to fabricate the hydrochar via hydrothermal carbonization process, which was further applied to remove Cd(II)....

Scientific facts about the relationships between the goals are indispensable for the rational social discourse on solving the various conflicting goals on the way to sustainable crop production. Therefore, the German Society for Agronomy has compiled scientific findings on the topics of biodiversity, climate relevance and climate resilience, nutrie...

Zusammenfassung FAIRagro ist ein Konsortium in der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) in Deutschland um Forschungsdaten der Agrosystemforschung FAIR – d. h. auffindbar (F), zugänglich (A), interoperabel (I) und für andere Forschende domänenübergreifend nachnutzbar (R) zu machen. In der deutschen Forschungslandschaft rund um nachhaltige...

Conversion of the low-valued invasive plant biomass into high-grade carbonaceous materials may provide a novel strategy to tackle the global issues of climate changes and exotic plant invasion. In this study, the hydrochar was fabricated from the biomass of Eupatorium adenophorum spreng. via hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) process to remove Cr(VI)...

Crop yield prediction is critical for investigating the yield gap and potential adaptations to environmental and management factors in arid regions. Crop models (CMs) are powerful tools for predicting yield and water use, but they still have some limitations and uncertainties; therefore, combining them with machine learning algorithms (MLs) could i...

This year, almost 50% of the European agricultural area suffered from drought stress. The tendency for the next years is constantly increasing. Therefore, plants develop different strategies to adapt to drought stress like in morphological, physiological and molecular pathways. In addition to drought stress, there are other challenges to handle wit...

Breeding of multi-resistant varieties to reduce yield loss due to disease damage and lodging, and reduction of input intensity are of high importance for a more sustainable cereal production. The aim of this study was to evaluate (i) yield reduction caused by diseases and lodging and (ii) impact of input intensity and soil fertility in cereal varie...

Crop breeding has boosted global agricultural productivity over recent decades, but little is known about its contribution to climate change mitigation. Here we assess greenhouse gas emissions per unit land (GHGL) and greenhouse gas emissions per unit harvest product, i.e. carbon footprint (CFP) of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) and winter rye (S...

Download at: https://www.thuenen.de/media/publikationen/thuenen-workingpaper/ThuenenWorkingPaper_198.pdf (only in German) --- We provide an overview of the state of knowledge on the climate change impacts on German crop production and generate model-based, quantitative and spatially differentiated simulations of the yield changes of the most impo...

Current wheat crop management practices in the Nile Delta of Egypt are unsustainable due to the overuse of limited water resources. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate opportunities to maximize wheat yield and resource efficiency including irrigation water use efficiency (WUE), nitrogen use efficiency (NUE), and solar radiation use...

Future agriculture faces challenges to meet the accelerated climatic changes and to meet society's needs for a secure food supply through sustainable production. This report describes measures in the range of cultivation technology, cultivation management and breeding, which face these challenges, and it identifies synergistic potentials of the use...

Future agriculture faces challenges to meet the accelerated climatic changes and to meet society's needs for a secure food supply through sustainable production. This report describes measures in the range of cultivation technology, cultivation management and breeding, which face these challenges, and it identifies synergistic potentials of the use...

Key message Considerable breeding progress in cereal and disease resistances, but not in stem stability was found. Ageing effects decreased yield and increased disease susceptibility indicating that new varieties are constantly needed. Abstract Plant breeding and improved crop management generated considerable progress in cereal performance over t...

The search for approaches to a holistic sustainable agriculture requires the development of new cropping systems that provide additional ecosystem services beyond biomass supply for food, feed, material, and energy use. The reduction of chemical synthetic plant protection products is a key instrument to protect vulnerable natural resources such as...

Zusammenfassung Das Klima und die Witterung sind prägende Faktoren für den Pflanzenschutz. Bereits vor 100 Jahren haben sich Wissenschaftler im Nachrichtenblatt für den Deutschen Pflanzenschutzdienst dieser Thematik gewidmet. Die Aus-wirkungen des Klimawandels sind ambivalent und es wird insgesamt zu einer Veränderung des Schaderreger-spektrums kom...

We need to produce higher foods even under declining natural resources to feed the projected population of 9 billion by 2050 and to sustain food security and nutrition. Abiotic stress has adversely affected canola crop and oil quality especially in sandy soils. To combat this stress, adaptation at the farm level using new and cost-effective amendme...

Due to quick growth of population, climate change and diminished natural resources, food security and nutrition issues face major challenges. Crop models successfully proved crop yield simulation under diverse environments, biotic constraints, gene factors and climate change impacts and adaptation. But, the accuracy of crop models for yield estimat...

Yield development of agricultural crops over time is not merely the result of genetic and agronomic factors, but also the outcome of a complex interaction between climatic and site‐specific soil conditions. However, the influence of past climatic changes on yield trends remains unclear, particularly under consideration of different soil conditions....

Global production of rye (Secale cereale L.) has substantially decreased over the last decades on the expense of intensive wheat and barley production. This continuous concentration on few intensive crops results in a marginalization of traditional land management systems and loss in agricultural biodiversity. Rye is a traditional temperate climate...

Nitrogen (N) pulse is a frequent event in agroecosystems caused by fertilization. Understanding the responses of nitrogen metabolisms in native crops and invasive weeds to N pulses is essential in investigating the invasive mechanism of invasive weeds. A pot experiment was carried out to study the impacts of N pulse and the interspecific competitio...

Motivation Minor cereals like rye (Secale cereale L.) are increasingly lagging behind intensive wheat and barley production European and Canadian cropping systems. This development entails an ongoing reduction in agrobiodiversity. Anyhow, rye has great potential as a multipurpose cereal featuring high nutrient and water use efficiency as well as dr...

Ein optimiertes Aussaatmuster mit gleichmäßigen Abständen zwischen den Pflanzen erhöht den nutzbaren Standraum je Einzelpflanze und reduziert intraspezifische Konkurrenzeffekte. Neben höheren und stabileren Erträgen sind auch Vorteile hinsichtlich Ressourcennutzungseffizienz, Stresstoleranz und Unkrautunterdrückungsvermögen zu erwarten. Aktuell wir...

Yield gap describes the difference between the potential yield of a specific crop genotype in a given environment and farmers' actual yield. Narrowing yield gaps offers the opportunity to increase production without expanding cropland. Quantifying and explaining farmers' yield gaps allows identifying the constraints that farmers face regarding prod...

Ecosystems around the world generate a wide range of services. Often, there are trade-offs in ecosystem service provision. Managing such trade-offs requires governance of interdependent action situations. We distinguished between (1) enhancing action situations where beneficiaries create, maintain, or improve an ESS and (2) appropriation action sit...

Climate change constitutes a major challenge for high productivity in wheat, the most widely grown crop in Germany. Extreme weather events including dry spells and heat waves, which negatively affect wheat yields, are expected to aggravate in the future. It is crucial to improve the understanding of the spatiotemporal development of such extreme we...

Drip irrigation has been widely touted as a potential mean to promote ecological sustainability in arid crop production. However, the long-term viability of this practice also depends on its economic sustainability. Despite the potential increase in water use efficiency and yield, the system also needs to generate higher income to be popular among...

Ecosystems all around the world generate a wide range of provisioning, regulating and cultural services. Often there are trade-offs where optimizing one ecosystem service (ESS) provision reduces other ESS. Managing such trade-offs requires adapted and effective governance. Our work contributes to finding appropriate institutional mechanisms by iden...

China's crop production sector faces severe water scarcity issues. Previous research has shown that effective water conservation policies exert strongly negative impacts on agricultural production and farmers' income, which make them politically unfeasible under Chinese conditions. To highlight ways out of this dilemma, the present study tests thre...

The major wheat production region of China the North China Plain (NCP) is seriously affected by air pollution. In this study, yield of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) was analyzed with respect to the potential impact of air pollution index under conditions of optimal crop management in the NCP from 2001 to 2012. Results showed that air pollutio...

In the dominant winter wheat (WW)-summer maize (SM) double cropping system in the low plain located in the North China, limited access to fresh water, especially during dry season, constitutes a major obstacle to realizing high crop productivity. Using the vast water resources of the saline upper aquifer for irrigation during WW jointing stage, may...

An adjusted irrigation regime may help to minimize the risk of soil compaction, which is a major yield constraining factor in global crop production, constituting a serious issue in the winter wheat–summer maize double cropping system of the North China Plain. Thus this study aimed to evaluate the natural changes of soil penetration resistance (PR)...

DOI: 10.5073/JfK.2015.12.01, https://doi.org/10.5073/JfK.2015.12.01

Overuse of nitrogen (N) fertilizer constitutes the major issue of current crop production in China, exerting a substantial effect on global warming through massive emission of greenhouse gas (GHG). Despite the ongoing effort, which includes the promotion of technologically sophisticated N management schemes, farmers' N rates maintain at excessive r...

Water pricing is regarded as the most important and simplest economic instrument to encourage more efficient use of irrigation water in crop production. In the extremely water-scarce Tarim River basin in northwest China, improving water use efficiency has high relevance for research and policy. A Bayesian network modeling approach was applied, whic...

Modern agriculture heavily depends on energy consumption, especially fossil energy, but intensive energy input increases the production cost for producers and results in environmental pollution. Organic agricultural production is considered a more sustainable system, but there is lack of scientific research on the energy consumption between organic...

The Tarim River basin, located in Xinjiang, NW China, is the largest endorheic river basin in China and one of the largest in all of Central Asia. Due to the extremely arid climate, with an annual precipitation of less than 100 mm, the water supply along the Aksu and Tarim rivers solely depends on river water. This is linked to anthropogenic activi...

The extremely arid Aksu-Tarim Region (ATR) in northwestern China is one of the country’s most important cotton production bases. However, in recent years, the negative ecological consequences of the intensive agricultural production become apparent. Apart from the degradation of riparian vegetation, competition for scarce water resources among farm...

To assess the attainable greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential from crop production in China's most important grain production region, the North China Plain (NCP), single farm environmental and economic performances of 65 winter wheat–summer maize (WW–SM) producing households were determined. The results revealed a huge heterogeneity among farm...

The extremely arid Tarim Basin in northwest-ern China is an important cotton and fruit production region. However, extensive agricultural land reclamation combined with unreasonable water use in recent decades resulted in degradation of ecosystems along the Tarim River. With declining water availability, it is becoming increasingly important to uti...

The Tarim River Basin, located in Xinjiang, NW China, is the largest endorheic river basin of China and one of the largest in whole Central Asia. Due to the extremely arid climate with an annual precipitation of less than 100 mm, the water supply along the Aksu and 5 Tarim River solely depends on river water. This applies for anthropogenic activiti...

The extremely arid Tarim Basin (TB) in north-western China is one of the country's most important cotton production bases. However, in recent years the negative ecological consequences of the intensive agricultural production become apparent. Apart from the degradation of riparian vegetation, competition for scarce water resources among farmers tig...

Massive expansion of irrigation agriculture and consecutive overuse of water resources leads to on-going degradation of natural riparian ecosystems along China`s longest inland river the Tarim River in the Xinjiang Province. Water pricing and water quota are generally considered efficient means to push farmers towards a wiser use of scarce water re...

The extremely arid climate of the Tarim Basin in Northwestern China offers ideal production conditions for cotton, making the region one of the nation’s major cotton production bases. However, in the last decades the overuse of water resources for agricultural production led to severe ecological degradation and increasing competition for water amon...

Input intensification has for a long time been China’s strategy to increase crop production and satisfy its people’s growing food demand. However, in recent years excessive input levels have been reached, resulting in an ever increasing emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) by China’s agricultural sector and increasing cost of crop production for farm...

This paper assessed cotton production and land use change (CPLC) and resource competition along the Aksu-Tarim River (ATR) of Xinjiang, China. Trend analysis, correlation analysis, and the Comparative Advantage Indicies (CAI); Efficiency Advantage Index (EAI), Scale Advantage Index (SAI) and Aggregated Advantage Index (AAI) analysis were used in gu...

Farmers in the oases along the Aksu-Tarim River suffer from severe seasonal water shortage caused by high fluctuations of river run-off. The uncertainty of water availability makes the planning of crop production and related investments extremely difficult. As a consequence farm management is often sub-optimal, manifesting in low input efficiencies...

Intercropping has a strong potential to counteract the severe degradation of arable land in the North China Plain (NCP). However, a rapid decline of intercropping can be observed in the last decades. The present paper investigates the reason for this development and suggests solutions on how to adjust intercropping systems to fit modern agriculture...