In many food cultures, legumes have historically provided the main source of dietary protein or serve as a necessary supplement to other complementary protein sources, for humans and farmed animals. While processed legume grains have been commonly used to provide nutrient dense foods such as tofu and tempeh in Asia, across Europe the production and consumption of legumes and legume-based products has been low but is now increasing, though whether these foods are derived from ‘home-grown’ legumes (i.e., cultivated within the EU and EU-Associated Countries) is much less-likely. Hence, the potential environmental and economic benefits of legumes are not necessarily being realized ‘at home’. It is, therefore, important that plant-based foods and feeds are delivered by legumes which are home-grown, since high import dependency means the multi-environmental and socio-economic benefits of legumes are forfeited. It is also important to note that as legumes are underutilized crops across Europe, the best-agronomic practices for legumes are not always carried out, and this leads to limited yields, and lower yield stability compared to cereals. Hence, where legume agronomy can be optimized, this can cascade to other following crops in the system, through soil fertility and function, and quality benefits, allowing the potential of diversified legume-based cropping systems to be fully realized. To valorize Ecosystem Services (ES), benefits provided by legumes, and legume-based crop and food systems, we must identify ‘values’ which can be defined in environmental and economic terms. While the potential multifunctional ES benefits of legumes are well known and complex, realizing these in practice has proven difficult. Yet, these benefits are well-positioned to address the three existential crisis facing humanity: climate change, biodiversity loss, and nutritional provision. Hence, ES monitoring is critical, though challenging, and requires that there is strict definition of the ES being monitored, and their underpinning ES-indicators (ESIs). In addition, monitoring approaches must be robust and flexible to ensure uptake and application of ESI monitoring across scales, both spatial and temporal. To address these challenges, legumES propose a set of strategic and fully inclusive multiactor driven solutions, supported by the of practical methodologies, and tools to help inform how legumes and legume-based crop systems should be deployed and monitored to realize diversified legume-based cropping systems in the EU and EU-Associated countries. Our state-of-the-art framework will also account how the environmental benefits of legume-based crop production may be best-balanced with the economic consequences of alternative land use scenarios. LegumES will therefore also diversify legume research to include crops, ecosystem services, contexts, and scales not yet well studied, to provide the agroecological knowledge-base farmers need to amplify their potential benefits.
The overall aim of legumES is to share, showcase, co-develop, and implement the knowledge, key agronomic practices, methodologies, and tools which will allow optimized legume-based systems, and valorization of the ES benefits provided. This is delivered across a diverse range of the major EU pedoclimatic regions. Other aims are to identify, develop, implement, and valorize practical methodologies and tools to monitor the impact of Biological Nitrogen Fixation (BNF) and other multi-functional provisions underpinned by legumes, in a diverse array of novel and innovative Pilot Studies, and to ally operations at the field- and farm-scale to optimize production with assessment of ESIs using a strategic suite of advanced economic and life cycle assessment (LCA) and economic modelling approaches.
PIK will use the open-source model MAgPIE for an integrated assessment of the global food system, investigating the future role of legumes for food, feed and bioenergy in various scenarios, as well as the influence of legume-related policy interventions and market dynamics on environmental ES indicators (WP3).
