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Recycling: more recycling means agricultural production with lower economic and environmental costs

Waste is a human concept – it does not exist in natural ecosystems. By imitating natural ecosystems, agroecological practices support biological processes that drive the recycling of nutrients, biomass and water within production systems, thereby increasing resource-use efficiency and minimizing waste and pollution.

Recycling can take place at both farm-scale and within landscapes, through diversification and building of synergies between different components and activities. For example, agroforestry systems that include deep rooting trees can capture nutrients lost beyond the roots of annual crops. Crop–livestock systems promote recycling of organic materials by using manure for composting or directly as fertilizer, and crop residues and by-products as livestock feed. Nutrient cycling accounts for 51 percent of the economic value of all non-provisioning ecosystem services, and integrating livestock plays a large role in this. Similarly, in rice–fish systems, aquatic animals help to fertilize the rice crop and reduce pests, reducing the need for external fertilizer or pesticide inputs.

Recycling delivers multiple benefits by closing cycles and reducing waste that translates into lower dependency on external resources, increasing the autonomy of producers and reducing their vulnerability to market and climate shocks. Recycling organic materials and by-products offers great potential for agroecological innovations.

Database

Sandeep Narayan Jamjade is a farmer residing in Jalochi Village, Baramati, and Pune, India. He is 37 years old with a family of 11. He started his farming venture when he was 24. It took him years of trial and error to adopt various practical solutions leading to ecologically sustainable agricultural...
India
مقال في مجلة
2021
Malawi is a small country located in southern Africa with only 119,000 km2 for a population of about 16.7 million people. With agriculture as the mainstay of the economy, Malawi’s high population density of 140 people/km2 requires that agricultural productivity and other ecosystem services must be optimized. As part of...
Malawi
دراسات الحالة
2016
One of our food system's main challenges is the inadequate relationship between the cost of production and production factors as a whole. Therefore, food production and distribution systems are often at a disadvantage to local producers. New research reveals the benefits for farmers and growers, local suppliers, citizens, and the environment...
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
حدث
2021
Recycle agriculture has been the effective way to achieve cleaner agricultural production and sustainable utilization of agricultural resources. It is also an inevitable choice for modern agriculture to step out of developmental woes. This paper discusses the connotations, characteristics, theoretic basis and principles of recycle agriculture. The paper, especially, illustrates...
China
مقال في مجلة
2013
The University of Vermont’s (UVM) Agroecology & Livelihoods Collaborative (ALC) will offer a graduate summer course on “Introduction to Agroecology”.  This hybrid, graduate level, 4-week course presents an in-depth overview of research and applications in the field of agroecology. The first three weeks of the course are online, and the last week students meet face...
United States of America
التعلّم
2019