Transforming agrifood systems in a win-win for health and environment: evidence from organic rice-duck coculture

Effects of long-term different-scale rice-duck farming on the growth and yield of paddy rice

BACKGROUND

To maintain rice production and increase revenue, rice-duck (RD) farming is a contemporary ecological cycle technology that has been widely used in Asia. However, due to the clustering activity of duck flocks, the consequences of long-term RD farming on rice growth at different scales are still unknown. Here, we studied RD farming using several different treatments (CK: conventional rice farming; RD1: 667 m2 ; RD2: 2000 m2 ; and RD3: 3333 m2 ).

RESULTS

The results demonstrated that the maximum tillers, effective spikes, dry matter accumulation, and lodging index of rice under RD farming were significantly decreased by 17.9%, 9.8%, 14.8%, and 17.8%, respectively, which ultimately caused a significant decrease in yield of 10.6%. However, RD farming significantly increased root oxidation activity and the ear-bearing tiller rate of rice by 25.5% and 11.1%, respectively, and improved yield stability. For different scales of RD farming, the lodging resistance index of RD1 was significantly lower than that of RD2 and RD3 by 10.0% and 15.2%, respectively, whereas the root oxidation activity and dry matter accumulation of RD2 were significantly higher than those of RD1 and RD3 by 11.1%, 4.7%, 8.6%, and 5.1%, respectively. For rice yield, there was no significant difference among the different scales.

CONCLUSION

This long-term experiment helped elucidate the complicated effects of RD farming at different scales on the growth and yield of rice. It is also critical to consider the economic advantages of different scales of RD farming to assess the impact of this system more thoroughly. © 2023 Society of Chemical Industry.

Organic agriculture and foods: advancing process-product integrations

With a doubling of the human population during the last 45 years and Earth's annual resources being already depleted mid-year, it becomes increasingly clear that the food systems need to change. The most common food related needs required are drastic changes of the current food production systems, diet change and food loss/waste reduction. As for agriculture no further land expansion is responsible and more food needs to be grown sustainably on less land and on healthy soils. For food processing, gentle, regenerative technologies have to generate healthy foods based on consumer requirements. Organic (ecological) food production is increasing worldwide but the interface between production and processing of organic foods is still hazy. This paper reviews the history and current state of organic agriculture and organic foods. Existing norms for organic food processing and urgent needs for their gentle, consumer-oriented processing are presented. Key issues such as production systems integration, water efficiency, plant and soil microbiota, biodiversity and supplementary food production systems are discussed. Processing of organic foods using fermentation, microbial/food biotechnological processes and sustainable technologies for retaining desirable nutrients and removing undesirable ones are proposed. Environment and consumer-oriented concepts for future production and processing of human food supplies are proposed.