# Towards Climate Smart Farming--A Reference Architecture for Integrated Farming Systems
## 5 Case Study  
The proposed architecture envisages upgrading, in terms of sustainability, areas where different agricultural systems, such as crops, livestock and forestry, coexist. For the purpose of the paper, a case study was considered in the area of the Western Macedonia, Greece for evaluating the components of MiFarm-CSA architecture. The area of interest is located in a region of Western Macedonia in Greece, called Grevena. It is a mountainous area which is surrounded by a forest and includes a wide variety of flora, including fruit trees, grapevine, berries and vegetables. Nearby the forest, there is rich livestock activity by local farmers. The main challenges raised in this area are summarized as follows:  
* Climate change has affected the biodiversity of the area, having negative impacts on the yield production and the soil quality. * High operational and labor costs (energy needs, animal feeding) add a lot of pressure to farming businesses. * The extensive use of chemical inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) has negatively affected the water cycle. * The animal waste management is not sufficient, leading to negative environmental effects and waste of resources. * The lack of forestry woodland management results in high risks of things such as wildfires. * Low cooperation between local farming businesses due to a poor local market. * A wide skill gap between each kind of system, deteriorating the objective of collaboration considerably. * Technological deficiencies, as farmers are not aware of modern monitoring and surveillance methods to reduce their labor costs. * Absence of local professional groups in MFS rules out the possibility of combining local agricultural and livestock practices. These challenges hinder the local farmers and stakeholders from further extending and utilizing their resources. In addition, farmers and stakeholders are quite skeptical towards changing--and therefore increasing their profits and sustainability--to a collaborative farming scheme such as MFS. Within MiFarm-CSA, the cooperation between the forest, the local farms and the local stakeholders will be fostered by applying the EVAM methodology in integrating sustainable agriculture, livestock and forestry combinations. The rationale behind this lies in products' attractiveness (high nutritionally valuable products, longer shelf life of dairy products), Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) products and livestock welfare (animal immunological status enhancement and efficient animal breeding systems). Through the IDCON layer a variety of combinations of mixed farming solutions will be monitored, resulting in providing valuable data that can be further analyzed to reveal interesting correlations that would be impossible to discover otherwise. Moreover, MiFarm-CSA using SECF and MFaS, is expected to reduce the environmental footprint of the system, decrease input and management costs and increase the system's overall productivity. In detail, it is expected to contribute to the decrease of atmospheric CO2 pollution and to the mitigation of global warming, through the carbon sequestration process. In order to achieve it, the proposed architecture will exploit forestry and managed woodland in-between the cultivation and grazing lands and the livestock wastes so as to increase carbon sequestration. Moreover, an additional increase of the total volume of woodland biomass will further increase the carbon sequestration. Furthermore, weed management cost is expected to decrease with the use of animal grazing, which leads to a reduction of machine hours required as an indirect measurement of fossil fuel consumption, and the use of multiched woodland material can decrease the evaporation of soil water and consequently reduce the irrigation water volume. Last but not least, the animal waste usage in crop cultivation will increase its quality, decrease use of chemicals and also decrease transportation costs.