Quantifying nutrient recovery efficiency and loss from compost-based urban agriculture

Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture

Farm management, not soil microbial diversity, controls nutrient loss from smallholder tropical agriculture

Tropical smallholder agriculture is undergoing rapid transformation in nutrient cycling pathways as international development efforts strongly promote greater use of mineral fertilizers to increase crop yields. These changes in nutrient availability may alter the composition of microbial communities with consequences for rates of biogeochemical processes that control nutrient losses to the envi...

Urban agriculture

This paper describes the scale and nature of agricultural production in urban, suburban and peri-urban zones of Mexico City and how these have adapted to the changing demands from urban populations for food, wood and recreation. It also demonstrates how agricultural producers have successfully adapted their products and their production methods, including building on traditional production syst...

Quantifying the sustainability of agriculture

The rural sustainability index is a scientifically based tool to quantify the performance of agriculture. The sustainability of crop production is quantified from three perspectives; people, planet and profit. Within each perspective, one condition was selected that must be met to warrant agriculture. These are: No hazardous work should be used within the crop production chain; agricultural cro...

Compost: Production, Quality, and Use in Commercial Agriculture

Introduction Compost is a soil amendment produced through the metabolism of an organic substrate—a surface on which organisms grow—by aerobic (oxygen-requiring) microbes under controlled conditions. Composting is an ancient agricultural technology going back to biblical times that still has important applications in modern agriculture. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in compost ...