Malta is one of the most livestock dense EU Member States and could easily be self-sufficient with plant nutrients via the use of livestock manures for fertilisation. However, firmly established practices means that the liquid manures are pumped into the Mediterranean Sea via the country's wastewater treatment plants, while the solids undergo some mostly uncontrolled composting, whereby the plant available nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients from this fraction also is lost via emissions, leaching and runoff. As a result, crop production in Malta is sustained by expensive chemical fertiliser, imported from Italy in small bags. Probably more than half of the carbon in the organic matter of livestock manures is lost via composting; losses happen as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and laughing gas, thereby being counterproductive to climate goals, whereas the organic matter is depleting in Maltese soils at the cost of soil fertility and an ever increasing irrigation need, which in turn accelerate soil salination and alkalisation.
The SYNECO project has since 2016 worked on solutions to turn around the described, alarming situation, which is unacceptable from all points of view, not least from environment, climate, nature, biodiversity, health and social economic perspectives. SYNECO ends September 2025 but has proven that liquid manure can be processed in a biogas plant and further processed into bio-based fertilisers for crop fertilisation. SYNECO has introduced soil analysing and fertiliser planning to Maltas vegetable and fruit farmers, members of FCCS, which is the largest farmer organisation in Malta. We have for this used ORGANE’s CropManager FaST software, since fertiliser plannign is a pre-condition for farmers handling the switch from chemical to bio-based fertilisation.
We have produced two policy briefs to outline the benefits of a country-wide dissemination of sustainable manure management practices alike those developed by SYNECO, and believe that authorities and decisions makers in Malta will initiate this mandatory next step soon: