Intensive agriculture and livestock breeding represent critical factors in the Lombardy region since the
nitrate vulnerable zones are 62% of utilised agricultural plain area. The aim of reducing the environmental
risk caused by agriculture activities (e.g. nitrogen losses into groundwater and atmosphere) can be
only achieved through a critical and scientific analysis of livestock manure management in a whole-farm
perspective. Keeping in mind this objective, the decision support system ValorE was developed. It
can be described as a tool able to evaluate from the environmental, technical, agronomic and economic
points of view the main components of manure management (production, storage, treatment and land
application) for a variety of livestock types (i.e., cattle, swine, poultry, sheep, goats and horses), under
different scenarios adopted at farm and territorial scale. ValorE consists of three main components: data
management subsystem, model management subsystem and two versions of user-interface, both for
farm and territorial scale. Most of the inputs to the Decision Support System comes from external databases, while a software
tool developed in the .NET environment and implemented using object oriented programming (C# language),
provides the logic to manage the scenario simulation of agronomic and environmental farm-scale
models. Users and stakeholders can carry out comparative analysis, starting from the knowledge of the
current perspective, in terms of manure management system at farm or territorial scale by interrogating
the available databases. Moreover, they can generate different alternative scenarios thanks to different
options for the manure handling and cropping system simulation. Then they can finally evaluate and
compare different scenarios through multidisciplinary and synthetic indicators but also visualise spatial
effects exploiting the coupled webGIS. ValorE is therefore an attempt to offer a comprehensive tool for
improving both farm strategy and decision making process, which is particularly important in a very
intensive agricultural area, with one of the highest livestock density in the world, as Lombardy