Application of DEXiPM^® as a tool to co-design pome fruit systems towards sustainability

The design of fruit production systems considering the latest innovations is a real challenge. Before being tested in an experimental station or in real farm conditions, the global sustainability of these newly designed orchards needs to be evaluated. Based on the DEXiPM® model, the DEXiPM-pomefruit tool has been designed to make an ex ante assessment of the sustainability of innovative orchard systems. This model is based on a decision tree breaking the decisional problems of sustainability assessment into simpler units, referring to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Based on two case studies, we present here the steps and thought process of our group to improve fruit production systems towards innovative and integrated production systems. DEXiPM-pomefruit tool has been tested on apple and pear production systems in the frame of a working group of European researchers. It proved to be sufficiently reliable to select the most promising innovations in a given context. DEXiPM-pomefruit was also used as a dashboard to determine strengths and weaknesses of the tested production systems and therefore to identify improvements.