Waste to Revenue: Novel Fertilisers and Feeds RnD4Profit-14-1-022

Summary

​Agricultural industries produce large volumes of waste containing valuable nutrients, carbon and water. Unfortunately, this waste doesn’t have the right nutrient balance to be directly used as a crop fertiliser. It is typically diluted with moisture, making transportation and reuse off-farm impractical and unfeasible.

Food crops don’t use the nitrogen in fertilisers very efficiently and there are significant losses in the process of converting food protein into meat protein.

These are widely recognised issues, with the majority of carbon, and almost all nitrogen and phosphorus lost in emissions or waste streams. This project addressed these issues by converting agricultural waste and wastewater into novel feeds and fertilisers demonstrating reduced farming inputs and decreasing costs of primary production.