Vincent de Leijster

59 Almond farm profitability under agroecological management 4 4.1 INTRODUCTION Agroecological management holds the premise to maintain yields while providing additional ecological benefits (FAO, 2018). Natural ecosystem-inspired agricultural management, i.e. agroecological management, uses practices such as no tillage, vegetation cover, application of organic soil amendments and others (Wezel et al., 2014) to balance agricultural land productivity and ecological functionalities and improve the resilience to external biophysical disturbances (e.g. erosion, droughts, plagues, etc.)(Altieri, 2002). Although it is expected that improved resilience to environmental degradation will result in higher farm-level economic stability (Darnhofer, 2014), agroecological management may also result in reduced yields of the main crop adding uncertainties to investment (Kremen et al., 2012). However, few studies have tried to empirically demonstrate the effect of agroecological management on the farm’s economic performance, including all costs, benefits and externalities, which makes the adoption of agroecological practices a financially uncertain transition for farmers, thus hampering its large-scale implementation (Rodriguez et al., 2009; Schoonhoven and Runhaar, 2018). Therefore, we need a better understanding of how agroecological practices influence the long-term financial development of farms, and which financial barriers might need to be overtaken, to be able to accelerate the implementation of environmentally friendly agroecological practices. Agroecological practices in Mediterranean orchards, such as cover crops, organic soil amendment and no tillage, benefit erosion control, soil fertility, pollination, pest control, carbon stock and biodiversity (Almagro et al., 2016; De Leijster et al., 2019; Durán Zuazo et al., 2008b; Gómez et al., 2017; Ramos et al., 2011). Yet these practices are rarely implemented and conventional tillage without application of organic amendments is still the most widespread practice (García-Ruiz, 2010; Meerkerk et al., 2008). For example in eastern Andalusia (south-eastern Spain) more than 50% of the almond farms are certified organic (Junta de Andalucía, 2016), yet the mainstream orchard floor management of these organic orchards is conventional tillage, which involves a tillage frequency of 3 to 5 times a year withholding natural vegetation to grow. In a recent study, we demonstrated that, compared to conventional tillage management, agroecological management in Mediterranean almond plantations has the potential to improve the provisioning of ecosystem services by 17-24%, namely nutrient cycling, carbon stock, habitat provisioning, pest control, pollination and food provisioning (De Leijster et al., 2019). Other studies report comparable results, for example, it has been shown that vegetation covers in almond crops improve pollinator activity (Norfolk et al., 2016; Saunders et al., 2013), and soil organic carbon by 56-67% (Ramos et al., 2010a)