Circular Approaches in Small-Scale Food Production

Abstract

Globally, food production is one of the main water and energy consumers. Having in view the growing population on global scale, a higher efficiency of food production is needed. Circular approaches offer a large potential to enhance the efficiency of food production and have a long tradition in the food production process of mankind. However, industrial farming has interdicted traditional cycle-closed farming approaches leading to a variety of environmental challenges. The contribution illustrates the basics of traditional gardening and farming approaches and describes how their characteristics are adapted in innovative modern farming systems like aquaponic, permaculture, urban farming, as well as recovered traditional farming systems. The approach to combine traditional farming methods with modern ones will provide multiple benefits in the future to ensure food security. There is to be underlined that such a strategy holds a substantial potential of circular flux management in small scale food production. This potential could be transposed to a larger scale also, particularly in terms of agroforestry and integrated plant and animal husbandry or integrated agriculture and aquaculture. In this way, small-scale food production holds a large potential for the future implementation of the water-energy-food security nexus.

Urban Agriculture as an Alternative for the Sustainable Production of Maize and Peanut

“…These difficulties have promoted the emergence of new techniques and new places where agriculture is performed [6]. Currently, there is a boom in developing techniques that make efficient use of resources and that are friendly to the environment [6,11]. Sustainable urban agriculture is an alternative for producing more food with high quality in the city [11].…”

“…Currently, there is a boom in developing techniques that make efficient use of resources and that are friendly to the environment [6,11]. Sustainable urban agriculture is an alternative for producing more food with high quality in the city [11]. This kind of agriculture allows for the approach of using resources from the city (space, organic waste, and water) for promoting sustainability, producing food innocuously and with high nutritional value.…”

Factors influencing the fate of chemical food safety hazards in the terrestrial circular primary food production system—A comprehensive review

“…These references resulted in 21 groups of contaminants, such as radionuclides, per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), dioxin‐like compounds, acrylamides, and mycotoxins (Table S1). Apart from the contaminants, the search terms that represent the compartments within circular primary food production systems and corresponding circular agricultural processes were derived from the state‐of‐the‐art literature concerning the valorization of waste or byproducts (Campos et al., 2020; Mirabella et al., 2014; Oosting et al., 2022; Schneider et al., 2021; Van Zanten et al., 2019). The databases Scopus and Web of Science were used to search for relevant articles published in the English language from January 1, 2000 onward.…”