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Reuse of pineapple residues at small farms to improve nutrient-cycling and income stability as well as to reduce agricultural GHG emissions (rePRISING)
Project
Project code: 2819DOKA06
Contract period: 01.02.2020
- 31.12.2023
Budget: 155,650 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research
Keywords: recycling, fruit production, crop production, cultivation, ingredients, energy efficiency
Agricultural production in the Philippines faces the same challenges as anywhere else in the world, namely a combination of the need to (I) maintain soil fertility, (II) reduce its climate impact, (III) secure yield stability and achieve a (IV) high resource efficiency by closing material cycles. The production of pineapples is particularly challenging in this respect. The Philippines is the world's third largest producer of pineapples, producing more than 2.6 million metric tons. As a by-product of pineapple production, pineapple residues (PR; ~ 90 to 150 t ha-1) form an important biological resource. Despite of this, PR are commonly left at the edge of the field to rot or dried and burned, a conventional practice at especially small farms (< 2 ha) since it is costly and laborious to further utilize these residues for e.g., bioethanol, bromelain or biochar production. Reuse PR in terms of mulching and/or incorporation to replace mineral fertilizer however, might help to cope with all of the above mentioned challenges. Unfortunately, to date there is no clear evidence for that. Hence, the aim of this PhD-project is to demonstrate that returning PR (with or without secondary recycling due to prior extraction of valuable constituents) to the field is in principle suitable to maintain soil fertility, reduce the climate impact, secure yield stability and achieve high resource efficiency. Therefore, a combination of field and laboratory experiments as well as balances approaches will be applied. The main project aims are: (I) to investigate whether PR reuse in terms of mulching/incorporation minimizes GHG and gaseous C/N losses, increases C sequestration and improves the nutrient-cycling (C/N/P/K) (II) to determine how secondary recycling of certain PR components affects GHG emissions and nutrient-cycling (C/N/P/K) The project aims will be accomplished by combining field GHG measurements (UPLB) with incubation/greenhouse studies at ZALF.
Section overview
Subjects
- Specialised crops
- Agroecology
- Soil science
- Resource management
