Timelines to setup sustainable farming programs in Europe

If you want to see impact on harvest 2027, intervention programs should be in motion by the end of 2025.

In arable cropping systems, there are a range of interventions that drive a farm towards becoming a lower-emitting and more resilient system—that when done right can not only reduce emissions but also sequester atmospheric carbon in soils, improve soil health, water retention and biodiversity.

These interventions always sit within an agronomic calendar of field activities that recur on an annual basis for the primary purpose of food production. Those activities of course include sowing and harvesting, but also tilling, fertilisation, crop protection, irrigation, weeding, and more.

Every decision on a farm needs to be balanced with agronomic and financial priorities around yield maximisation, input cost reduction, crop quality and sale price, and subsidy schemes. When we start optimising for environmental sustainability, we're adding yet another priority to an already complicated set of decisions.

So, when setting up sustainable farming programs, the interventions we want to encourage have fixed windows where they can slot into the rotation. And this, in turn, affects how we structure the program setup phases.

Priority interventions

Within arable systems there are a range of optimisations we can make, but we know our two biggest levers towards reducing emissions and sequestering carbon in the soil are:

• Cover cropping—this means planting between main crops, increasing soil cover across the year. Cover crops with legumes naturally fix more nitrogen into the soil, reducing N-fertiliser inputs for the following crop, and biomass left on the soils contributes to building organic matter, soil carbon stocks, nutrient availability & water holding capacity.

• Reducing tillage—this means limiting the inversion of the soil. Soil microbes exposed to air increase their decomposition cycles enormously, releasing soil organic matter and carbon stocks into the atmosphere.

Note! There are many more interventions than this, but these two have outsized impact, so we always aim to include them in our recommendations to farmers. We'll focus on these two interventions in this article.

Education on sustainable practices like cover cropping is fundamental to practice adoption

Sowing and harvesting calendars

For most northern, central and eastern European farmers, there are two main planting windows:

1. Winter Crops: crops sown in the autumn (typically Sept–Oct) which overwinter in the vegetative stage and resume growth in early spring, reaching maturity and being harvested in early to mid-summer.

2. Spring Crops: sown in spring (typically March–May) after frost risk passes, and harvested in late summer or early autumn of the same year.

A farm's rotation will often have a mix of these crops on their fields at any one time. That means that their harvest activities take place throughout the early to late summer.

Rotational systems have multiple crops moving fields each year, so there are parallel schedules happening all at once—leaving different intervention windows on each field year on year.

Summer is a difficult season to approach farmers, since they're busy with harvest

Engaging farmers at the right time of year increases turnout & impact of your messages

Opportunities for cover cropping

Cover crops have the most impact if the crop can get to a reasonable size; the more biomass, the more carbon sequestration and nitrogen fixation. For this reason, cover crops slot in best before Spring Crops, after a Winter Crop, sown in August.

On the flip side, a winter crop sown after a spring crop has no window for cover cropping. Occasionally farmers can squeeze in a short cover crop between two winter crops, or a late-sown cover crop between spring crops if it can survive winter. In many geographies, the cold of winter will "terminate" a cover crop, limiting its growing period.

Tillage windows

Soil preparations typically occur in one or more of the following windows:

1. Right after harvest: for stubble management, residue incorporation, weed control, or volunteer seed germination

2. In the Autumn, after harvest but before frost to prepare seedbed for winter crops or for spring crops.

3. In the Spring: prepare seedbed for spring crops; break crust; incorporate fertilisers

Reduced tillage interventions focus on reducing soil inversion. This involves replacing conventional ploughing with with shallower cultivations or introducing direct-drill systems. Direct drill means sowing seeds directly into undisturbed soil, even into previous residues, and requires specialised (and expensive) equipment.

First interventions & first results

When running intervention programs, August becomes a critical make-or-break milestone: this is when farmers harvest Winter Crops and can plant their most impactful Cover Crops. If we miss this deadline to convincingly promote cover cropping or reduced-till interventions to farmers, then we miss our two biggest "sustainability" levers until the following year.

If we do successfully increase adoption of these practices, you can expect the impact to begin being meaningfully reflected in the crops harvested in Summer 2027.

Promoting cover cropping and reduced till by August 2026 is our best opportunity to impact crops harvested in Summer 2027

Starting early means you can use the current growing cycle to demonstrate towards the next one

Farmer recruitment and agronomic consultations

Working backwards from August, and acknowledging that the summer harvest is not a good time to get farmer's undivided attention, we recommend to finalise farmer recruitment by end of May. Outreach and farmer events can begin as early as the winter prior, but should commence no later than March.

As soon as farms are in the program, one-on-one consultations with agronomists are booked to assess the unique opportunities on each farm and translate it into economic terms for the farmer. (Compelling incentives are important here, but that's for another article!)

Farmer recruitment is best finalised by May, 2026. March and April are important months for farmer outreach and events

One-on-one consultations translate project incentives into tailored plans & bottom-line projections for farmers

Critical design element: Farmer incentive schemes

In value chain and Scope 3 programs with the food sector, no program is the same. Sustainability goals, buyer-supplier relationships, farmer networks, target crop calendars, cross-sector partnerships, budgets...... these are all factors that influence how we design programs, including outreach strategies and farmer incentive schemes.

It is critical to have farmer incentive schemes clear before we approach farmers, or we won't be compelling and miss our chance to make a first impression. When there are multiple players at the table (and if we're realistic about corporate bureaucracy) then the sooner these design elements start, the better. January is about as late as you would want to leave it.

To approach farmers, farmer incentives must be clear. Jan-Feb 2026 should be spent closing in on this with program partners

Where that leaves us

That pretty much brings us to now, October 2025. If you're hoping to deliver on sustainability targets with impact on 2027's harvest, it is ultimately dependent on decisions you make between now and December.

The most effective programs have multiple stakeholders; whether that's cross-sector collaborations between food sector, your suppliers, and implementation partners like eAgronom. These conversations and decisions take time! Don't leave it too late.

Partnerships and service providers should be falling into place before the end of 2025

eAgronom, your partner for Scope 3 intervention programs with arable farmers

• Born in Estonia in 2016, eAgronom has been working with and for arable farmers in Europe for over 9 years, developing farmer-first digital tooling for day-to-day farm management & record keeping, farm-government reporting, and sustainability performance monitoring.

• eAgronom's farmer-facing teams and agronomists work together with farmers to design and implement farm-level interventions focused on lowering emissions, increasing soil carbon and building resilience of our food systems. These teams also support farmers with annual data collection.

• eAgronom has developed deep, specialist regenerative agricultural expertise in our core geographies, by working with 1000s of farmers and by leading multi-year field trials in conjunction with universities, equipment and seed providers to test farm interventions in local contexts. We run several annual events around these trial sites to facilitate peer-to-peer learning amongst our extensive farmer networks.

  
  

Rhyannon Galea structures tailored Value Chain Programs with the food sector. If you'd like to know more about implementing regenerative farming programs, reach out to her at [email protected].