Delayed and reduced nitrogen fertilization strategies decrease nitrogen losses while still achieving high yields and high grain quality in malting barley

The current recommended N fertilization strategy resulted in a high proportion of situations satisfying malting grain protein content requirements, but also to high N losses. We pinpointed new N strategies resulting in better compromise between the three outputs studied. Some Pareto optimal strategies were particularly efficient to reduce N losses in all tested environments regardless of the climatic conditions. They, however, also slightly reduced calibrated yield compared to the reference strategy. Others interesting strategies performed better than the reference simultaneously for all three studied outputs, but depended on the region considered. A common feature of these strategies was later application of smaller doses of N. Our results, thus demonstrated that low-N strategies are possible for malting barley.