Abstract
Phosphate is supplied to agriculture by mining and fertilizer production, followed by different steps of phosphate utilization, including primary production, feed and food consumption, and conversion of biomass, with accumulation in soils, but little recycling and severe environmental losses. Phosphate is a limited essential nutrient, however, with very uneven distribution worldwide. Closing the cycle and reducing primary phosphate consumption are fundamental future challenges. Maize has a relatively high phosphate requirement. China and Germany together cover the whole range of maize production systems. The new Sino-German international research training group “Adaptation of Chinese and German maize-based food-feed-energy systems to limited phosphate resources” (AMAIZE-P) was initiated in 2018 as a joint venture of the China Agricultural University (Beijing, China) and the University of Hohenheim (Stuttgart, Germany). The interdisciplinary and complementary research is driven by the hypothesis that under phosphate limited conditions, high productivity and high phosphate use efficiency can be achieved simultaneously by adapting phosphate cycling and availability (sources) to the multipurpose phosphate demands (sinks) in maize-based food-feed-energy systems. The educational program for doctoral researchers in China and Germany includes joint block seminars, thematic field trips, case studies, methodological courses, doctoral researchers’ conferences, intercultural training sessions and personal training.
Highlights
Phosphorus (P), usually occurring as ortho-phosphate, is a nutritional element essential for humans, animals and plants
Two considerable challenges are not yet sufficiently addressed: environmental pollution and global resource limitation. Solutions to these challenges seem to be easy as both call for a reduction in the use of phosphate resources. This simple approach does not take into consideration that current phosphate use is rather inefficient, with open cycles, and that closing these cycles is an important strategy for both reducing environmental pollution and saving limited phosphate resources
As an overall hypothesis for future work, we propose that both the environmental problems and the exhaustion of global phosphate reserves can be avoided by optimizing foodfeed-energy production and consumption systems towards low but highly efficient phosphate input and closed cycles with a maximized phosphate return
Summary
Phosphorus (P), usually occurring as ortho-phosphate, is a nutritional element essential for humans, animals and plants. Previous research focused mainly on increasing the amount and quality of agricultural products and subsequent processing under the basic assumption that the supply of phosphate is market-driven, but in principle not limited This basic assumption must be changed and two demands must be met in order to maintain sustainable production of food, feed, energy and raw materials. Excess supply of phosphate with organic fertilizers, e.g., originating from feed additives, creates environmental problems in areas of Germany with high livestock densities and energy crop production. In China, the mean annual phosphate application per unit agricultural land in 2016 was 13 kg$ha–1 P (based on statistical data taken from the FAOSTAT online database[16]) This value is averaged from areas with intensive cropping including maize and very high annual application rates or even overfertilization of phosphate as reported for Chinese vegetable production[17] and from large areas of less intensive agriculture with low phosphate application rates or without any phosphate fertilization. Combining phosphate with ammonium fertilizer placement and bioeffectors in high pH soils may be an additional strategy[26,27,28]
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