Climate change and intensive agriculture with extensive use of chemical fertilizers are causing substantial loss of soil fertility, that is: desertification. There is an urgent need to recover degraded areas, especially in arid and semi-arid regions where desertification is a major issue.

Europe is more and more affected by a rise in drought conditions and/or extreme weather events, thus enhancing the risk of future desertification processes.

Data of the European Environmental Agency

Moreover, soil salification is growing exponentially on our planet, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. This is an irreversible phenomenon that erodes agricultural land and is generally due to the extreme agricultural practices.

These practices are implemented because of the continuing need to produce food and raw materials, through the adoption of unsuitable techniques that often do not provide a natural or artificial drainage system of the accumulation of salt in the earth. The damaging result for the fields is a decreasing yield of the land.

Location in which organic mineral fertilizer will be tested.

LIFE RecOrgFert PLUS wants to combat this phenomenon by giving its contribution.

The project will convert recovered sulphur and orange waste into highly valuable organic-mineral fertilizers that can contribute to restore the fertility of degraded lands lowering the pH of alkaline soils and increasing the crop yield, especially in arid and semi-arid areas.

Furthermore, the project will contribute to address the environmental issues of:

Excess of Sulphur

According to Kyoto-Protocol, producing organic-mineral fertilizers is one important way to re-use Sulphur in a “green” context such as fertilization.

Chemical fertilizers

Heavily used by farmers, they are polluting the underground water. Chemical fertilizers require increasing dosage year after year to get the same crop yield; this is a vicious cycle to be broken by substituting them with organic-mineral fertilizers which do not pollute soil and water.