Agriculture is crucial for the EU food supply and self-sufficiency, but also generates environmental challenges related to GHG emissions and nutrient pressure. European agriculture is under economic pressure due to its high dependency on import of primary nutrients and energy. Nutri2Cycle (N2C) aimed to enable the transition from the current suboptimal nutrient household in EU agriculture to the next-generation of agronomic practices, characterized by an improved cycling of nutrients and organic carbon.
Nowadays animal husbandry varies greatly between regions and countries, with the most intensive livestock production regions requiring (feed) and generating (manure) the largest nutrient streams whilst in those exact areas fertilization is limited. Meanwhile intensive crop production requires high nutrient efficiency products often realized by mineral fertilizer and insufficient (re)use of major plant nutrients and carbon. This has led to a disjunction between these 2 conventional pillars of agriculture. N2C started from the central notion that for better nutrient stewardship and mitigation, optimisation within these 2 pillars are necessary AND reconnection is needed by integrating farm-scale processing as 3rd pillar.
The project successfully set European baselines for existing farming systems and proposed, scrutinized and showcased more mature, optimized management systems including innovative technologies to better close the loops. N2C could conclude that the central three-way interaction as proposed is a viable approach for a more sustainable, circular European agriculture with farm scale anaerobic digestion and precision fertilization as key enabling technologies to mitigate GHG emissions. However, independent of the innovation, attention should be paid to down- or upstream stream effects of implemented processes as they might outweigh the positive impact of CNP recovery and recycling. Regional nutrient conditions (supply and demand) and energy prices showed to be leading in selecting the most optimal strategy and the economic feasibility of the selected innovation. At the same time, legal barriers and familiarity with the technology greatly influence transferability of technologies across regions.
