Data and code for "Functionally rich crop rotations increase calorie and macronutrient outputs across Europe"

This repository contains the data and scripts underlining the article Vico et al. "Functionally rich crop rotations increase calorie and macronutrient outputs across Europe", Nature Food, 2026. For further information see the publication, https://www.nature.com/natfood/. We used data of calorie and macronutrient (carbohydrate, protein, and fat) outputs from 16 long term experiments in Europe to ascertain how they are affected by crop rotational diversity, as measured by functional richness. This repository includes a core dataset (macronutrients_wholerot.csv), comprising whole rotation calorie and macronutrient outputs for each year, rotation, replicate/other treatment for 13 of the 16 sites used in the analyses. We do not have permission to share data at a similar level of detail for the remaining three sites: for these, we provide whole rotation calorie and macronutrient outputs for each year and rotation, averaged over the different replicates/other treatments, along with the standard deviation and number of observations included in the averaging (macronutreints_wholerotaggr.csv). Information on the experiment location, period covered, rotations included and other treatments is available Table S1 in the Supplementary Information to Vico et al. Calorie and macronutrient outputs for each year are the sum of those provided by all the crops in the rotation, weighed based on the rotation length. In other words, these calorie and macronutrient outputs are those produced by a one ha farm, where all the crops in the rotation are grown on areas proportional to their frequency in the rotation. For each crop, we selected a common retail product (e.g., flour for each cereal) and used its nutritional value to transform the observed marketable yield into calorie and macronutrient outputs. We considered three scenarios of use for forage crops - for milk, beef or biofuel production. As a result, the dataset contains information on the site (name, code) and, for each year, group and rotation, information on the rotation (sequence of crops, functional richness, inclusion of cereals, legumes, leys and/or broadleaves, fertilization regime), and outputs in calories (Gcal/ha/yr) and macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats; kg/ha/yr) when forage crops are used for milk (M), beef (B) or biofuel (F) production. Primary crop yield data can be made available upon reasonable requests and for specific purposes. We include also the R code for analyzing the calorie and macronutrient outputs for each year, rotation and replicate/other treatment and produce the results incorporated in the article.