[en] An Ecotron experiment evaluated agronomic and environmental performance of broccoli
production with four different bio-based fertilisers (BBFs) compared to a synthetic fertiliser (SYN) under a historic reference and a future RCP8.5 climate scenario. While SYN mostly outperformed BBFs in the reference climate, many advantages disappeared in the future climate where plants receiving BBFs had higher plant biomass and improved yield parameters compared to plants with SYN. Mechanistically, cropping systems with BBFs benefited from enhanced microbial activity and plants had higher nitrogen use efficiency than with SYN. While these results support BBFs as sustainable alternatives to SYN, further research is needed to limit the yield penalties observed under the future meteorological condition, which affected both bio-based and synthetic fertilisers, but the latter to a larger extend.
