Cropping on marginal land. Dedicated cropping for biomass feedstock on marginal land in Europe can be regarded as “spatial intensification of land use”. In ADVANCEFUEL Deliverable 1.3, “Marginal land” was de- fined as, “Land on which cost-effective food and feed production is not possible under given site conditions and cultivation techniques” (Xxxxx, 2011). Currently, there is no standardised or generally accepted definition of marginal land in the EU, which hampers the comparison of general findings between different studies performed on marginal land. In addition, the rea- sons for marginality can be very diverse: land unsuitable for food production; ambiguous low- er quality land; or economically marginal land (Xxxxxxxx, 2013). Xxxxxx et al. (2019) assesses the economic feasibility of miscanthus cultivation on marginal land for biogas production and comes to the conclusion that profitability can indeed be achieved depending on the individual case. But, the authors identified the biomass yield as the limiting factor of the economic attractiveness of cultivating miscanthus on marginal land, which is in line with previous studies (LfULG, 2014; Xxxxxx and Malins, 2014; Soldatos, 2015). Yields of at least 11 tonnes DM/ha are necessary to be economically competitive to maize si- lage. Biomass production costs per tonne depend very much on the achieved yields per hec- tare, which depends on the reason for marginality. Yields from some relative fertile marginal land can equal that of agricultural land. This was, for example, the case for willow SRC on abandoned farmland in Canada (Xxxxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxxxx, 2003) or for grass on very dry sites or sites prone to flooding compared to the control site in Ireland (Xxxxxx et al., 2017). But in general yields are lower on poor-quality marginal land compared to agricultural land (Xxxxxx and Malins, 2014). As agricultural land is primarily dedicated for food and feed pro- duction, cost estimates need to be based on energy crop yields found for commercial scale fields on unused marginal land. Xxxxxx et al. (2010) successfully developed a GIS-based model- ling approach for making informed decisions for the identification of economic suitable and sustainable marginal sites for energy cropping. Another decision support tool for biomass se- lection on marginal land was developed and validated for diverse sites in France, Romania and Sweden (Xxxxxxxxx-Xxxxx et al., 2014). There is however no assessment on the biomass pro- duction cost reduction potent...
