Improved Nutrient and Energy Management through Anaerobic Digestion (INEMAD)

This proposal, INEMAD will concentrate on Innovative strategies to reconnect livestock and crop prodution farming systems. New flows of energy and materials within the agricultural sector (or linked to the agricultural sector) will be analysed and will create opportunities for re-thinking the relation between crop and livestock production. Various options to cope with recycling, greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, and bio-based economy will need an Integral assessment on energy and nutrient flows and will cause new arrangements between firms, land use and land management. INEMAD will address the question of what new methods and how new arrangements should be developed to restore the recycling withing the specialisation context.

To realize these ambitions, the leading principle of INEMAD is a triangular enlargement of the traditional farming systems with a "processing" system. Processing is proposed as a third system, to be linked with crop and the livestock production, in order to increase agricultural productivity while reducing external energy input and closing nutrient cycle. Nutrient recycling can be done by biogas production and the use of digestate as fertilizer. Digestate can not only replace the manure but also chemical fertiliser because of its comparable properties. INEMAD will analyse improvements options for biogas plants, valorisation options for the digestate, Improve the management by the use of optimisation models and compare organisational structures.