PermVeg: A generic tool to design and assess crop rotations for permanent vegetable production systems.

As part of the Permveg Work package an easy to use software package has been developed to design and assess alternative vegetable rotations. The model combines vegetable crops to generate all possible crop rotations for a given period, based on a number of explicit criteria (objectives and restrictions) controlled by the user. The criteria eliminate in early stages those crop rotations that are undesirable. The criteria relate among others to the most important socio-economic and environmental factors in vegetable production, i.e. profitability, labour requirements and costs of pesticide use.