Between the 15th and 17th of October, our partners from the University of Liège (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech), represented by Lucas Bergenhuizen, participated in the RAMIRAN 2025 Conference which took place in Wageningen in the Netherlands. The team submitted an abstract and prepared a poster presenting the results of an Ecotron experiment evaluating the efficiency and environmental impact of four different BBFs compared to a synthetic fertiliser under two contrasted climates.
About the poster
This poster nicely summarizes the contribution of ULiège to Work Package 5: Agronomic Studies. We were very pleased to share the results of our experiment conducted at the TERRA-Ecotron (www.ecotron.uliege.be) with the broader public. This facility, which can realistically replicate multifactorial climate scenarios at the mesocosm scale, was specifically chosen to investigate the response of a cropping system to four selected BBFs in the context of climate change. These BBFs were compared to a synthetic fertiliser (SYN) under a historic reference and a future RCP8.5 climate scenario.
While SYN mostly outperformed BBFs in the reference climate, many advantages disappeared in the future climate where plants receiving BBFs had higher plant biomass and improved agronomic parameters (such as NUE and PUE) compared to plants fertilised with SYN. Mechanistically, cropping systems with BBFs also benefited from enhanced soil microbial activity but systematically emitted more GHG than SYN. Interestingly, we also observed decreased N₂O fluxes for most BBFs under future climate. While these results support BBFs as sustainable alternatives to SYN, further research is needed to limit the yield penalties observed under the future meteorological conditions, which affected all types of fertilisers. Given the complexity of climate x fertiliser interactions, we also stress the importance of empirical data to evaluate BBFs across diverse contexts to help develop scalable, region-specific solutions.