Mixed Food Processing, Germany

Scarce available resources need to be used efficiently and nutrient and carbon cycles need to be closed. Both can be achieved by using digestate obtained from mixed food processing waste streams (vegetables, fruit, pomace from wine production) as soil improvers. While research to date has proven their potential as soil improvers, there is a need for further exploration from a full value chain perspective – from the waste generation until its use as soil improvers on agricultural fields.

DeliSoil will further assess the effect of food waste derived soil improvers on different soil types by comparing relevant soil health indicators and evaluating their contribution to improving food processing value-chains. The Living Lab will involve food processing companies, biogas plant and farmers.

Agro Energie Hohenlohe GmbH & Co KG is a farming enterprise with 80 hectares of land and combined heat power (CHP) with 500 kWel from biogas. It represents an Innovative Biorefinery based Lighthouse. The biorefinery combines different technologies to obtain nitrogen, phosphorus and organic fertilisers from anaerobic digestate. These products have high potential to be applied as soil improvers – they have been proven in plot-size and on-farm experiments to date.

Located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Dülmen, Germany, Yara GmbH is part of Yara International, a globally active company specialising in fertiliser production and agronomic services. The centre at Dülmen is comprised of the Yara Agronomy and R&D (YARD), where the focus is on developing and strengthening Yara’s knowledge of agronomy and sustainability while supporting novel product development, services and tools. The R&D services and trials unit present in Dülmen has the capacity to execute greenhouse and field trials to generate agronomically relevant information. For the DeliSoil project, this lighthouse will serve to conduct extensive laboratory characterisation with selected product candidates from the German Living lab trials. Greenhouse and / field trials with these products will be conducted in parallel to the German living lab activities to generate data on agronomic potential and soil health benefits of using organic-based products. Agronomically, we will evaluate crop response with yield and nutrient use efficiency. For soil parameters, we plan to evaluate the broad-spectrum soil health, which comprises of a detailed assessment of the physical, chemical as well as biological aspects of soil.

Results can be transferred to other regions in Germany and other EU countries. As the biorefinery is built as modular system, the modules can be adapted to respective needs for residue treatment at other sites.