Title of the Project: Reducing mineral fertilisers and agro-chemicals by recycling treated organic waste as compost and bio-char products
Project Acronym: FERTIPLUS
Project call identifier: FP7-KBBE-2011.1.2-02
Project website: http://www.fertiplus.eu
FERTIPLUS is a Seventh Framework Program Project (Grant Agreement N° 289853) co-funded by the European Commission, Directorate General for Research & Innovation, within the 7th Framework Programme of RTD, Theme 2 - Biotechnologies, Agriculture & Food. It is coordinated by Peter Kuikman from Alterra´s Group, Wageningen University,
The Netherlands and the team is formed by 14 partners from 5 different European Countries. Fertiplus with the long name of "Reducing the use of mineral fertilisers and agro-chemicals by recycling treated organic waste as compost and bio-char", will take up the challenge to identify innovative processing technologies and strategies to convert urban and farm organic waste to valuable and safe products for agriculture and allow industries to develop projects and provide adequate information on use and quality of the products. More info: FERTIPLUS intro (PDF)
Title of the Project: Improved Nutrient and Energy Management through Anaerobic Digestion
Project Acronyme: INEMAD
Project web: http://www.dlvinnovision.be/dlvinnovision/en/fp7-inufarmix-english
INEMAD will concentrate on innovative strategies to reconnect livestock and crop production farming systems. New flows of energy and materials within the agricultural sector (or linked to the agricultural sector) will be analysed and will create opportunities for re-thinking the relation between crop and livestock production. Various options to cope with recycling, greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, and bio-based economy will need an integral assessment on energy and nutrient flows and will cause new arrangements between firms, land use and land management. INEMAD will address the question of what new methods and how new arrangements should be developed to restore the recycling within the specialisation context.
To realize these ambitions, the leading principle of INEMAD is a triangular enlargement of the traditional farming systems with a processing system. Processing is proposed as a third system, to be linked with crop and the livestock production, in order to increase agricultural productivity while reducing external energy input and closing nutrient cycle. Nutrient recycling can be done by biogas production and the use of digestate as fertilizer. Digestate can not only replace the manure but also chemical fertiliser because of its comparable properties. INEMAD will analyse improvements options for biogas plants, valorisation options for the digestate, improve the management by the use of optimisation models and compare organisational structures. Fore more information: http://ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/agriculture/projects/cantogether_en.htm
Title of the Project: Crops ands ANimals TOGETHER
Project Acronyme: CANTOGETHER
Project web: http://www.fp7cantogether.eu/index.php
"Agricultural production faces numerous challenges regarding competitiveness, conserving natural and non-renewable resources (water, soil, air, phosphorus, fossil fuels) and ecosystem services (pollination, natural pest control, soil fertility). Society also expects from agriculture to be more environment-friendly in several issues such as climatic change, declining biodiversity, fossil energy depletion, and water shortage.
To overcome these limitations, CANTOGETHER will design innovative sustainable mixed farming systems (MFS). A design-assessment-adjustment iterative cycle will be adopted to ensure continuous validation and improvement of the innovative investigated MFS through a participative approach involving stakeholders and researchers across Europe. It will bring together a European network of 24 existing experimental and commercial farms covering a wide diversity of natural and socio-economic conditions in which the most promising MFS will be implemented in order to verify their practicability and to perform an in-depth integrated assessment (economic and environmental).
The MFS will be designed for individual farm level or collective implementation at the territorial level. At the same time, CANTOGETHER will define recommendations for a common agricultural policy promoting the development of these MFS.
The innovative analysed MFS will be based on the simultaneous utilization of crops (cash, feed and energetic) and various rearing animals with full recycling practices of animal wastes in view to ensure high resource-use efficiency (notably of nutrients), reduction in dependence on external inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, concentrated feeds), and acceptable environmental and economic performances.
CANTOGETHER will produce a complete picture of their effects and will facilitate their adoption by jointly involving researchers and the key actors of the agricultural sector (farmers, advisors, policy makers, and actors of the food supply chain)."
