Swiss nitrogen-cycle – expected deployment by 2013

The «Nitrogen-Project» has been mandated by the Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture and was elaborated at the Institute for Agricultural Economics at ETH Zurich. In the framework of this research project a recursive-dynamic agricultural allocation model has been used to anticipate the development of nitrogen emissions from agriculture on the sectoral level. This article provides an overwiew of the optimisation model and summarises the most important nitrogen-related results that have been estimated with model-based calculations for two agro-political scenarios. The model results show that the policy targets of the agricultural package AP 2007 for the year 2005 have only been reached with respect to agricultural ammonia emissions with an intended reduction of 9 %. Furthermore, our results show that from 2005 to 2013, environmentally harmful nitrogen emissions will not substantially decline just by continuing the present agricultural reform process (agricultural packages AP 2007 and AP 2011).