Toolbox

Overview

The NUTMON-Toolbox provides methods and tools to analyse farm management, determine nutrient flows and balances and financial performance indicators for one or more individual farms, providing insight into the efficiency of farm management in general and soil fertility management in specific. The toolbox will assist in understanding causes and magnitudes of losses of nutrients from the system, which will help to target interventions.

When applied to systems where INM practices are being introduced, nutrient balances can help to assess the effects of INM on soil fertility. When determined at a higher spatial scale (for instance at the level of agro-ecological zones or at national level) a nutrient balance can help to create awareness among policy makers and help define and target policy instruments.

Working steps

Steps to be taken when working with the NUTMON -Toolbox

1. Study the conceptual framework of NUTMON, essential for the appropriate and accurate execution of the subsequent steps.
2. Use the questionnaire to make a farm Inventory to identify and record out of which elements the farm exists and their characteristics.
3. Use the questionnaire to monitor the farm to tracks flows between the identified farm elements over time.
4. Obtain through measurement or secondary data, additional observations to gather information that is needed for the calculations but that cannot be given by the farmer, for instance nutrient contents of crop products and fertilizers, soil parameters and market prices.
5. Use the Data Entry Module to enter the collected data, resulting from the previous steps, into the Farm Database.
6. Maintain the Background Database with the Background Dada Module. Add the data resulting from the additional observations.
7. Data debugging through a series of consistency checks on the databases.
8. Analyse your data with the Data Processing Module. This component features automated calculation of nutrient flows, nutrient balances and economic indicators, combining information from the Farm Inventory, Farm Monitoring and the Background Database, producing farm reports with economic and biophysical results for individual activities within the farm and for the farm as a whole.
9. With the Data Processing Module the user can also decide to prepare individual farm reports. These reports can be made with the Data Processing Module (DPM), or by exporting the standard tables and graphs to MS Word.
10. For more in depth analysis export your data to MS Excel and SPSS.