DeliSoil project will work to improve the health of European agricultural soils

Last October, took place in Helsinki, Finland, the launch meeting of Delisoil, a new European project funded by the Horizon Europe program, with the participation of the BETA Technology Center of UVic-UCC. The consortium, led by the Natural Resources Institute of Finland (LUKE), will work for four years to improve the management of various organic wastes from the food industry. The aim of the project is to obtain soil improvers, a set of products that help to increase the health of agricultural soils from a physical and chemical point of view.

Among other sectors, the project will work with horticultural producers, meat companies, insect farms, wine farms and olive oil producers. DeliSoil plans to design new processing and valorization strategies for certain types of very specific waste effluents from these industries, and to optimize existing ones. Ultimately, and with a strong focus on the need to improve the health of agricultural soils on a European scale, these new strategies should help to produce new types of soil improvement products from recycled nutrients that, at the same time, are totally safe and of high quality.

A relevant part of the project’s tasks will focus on identifying the technological, legislative, financial and social barriers that currently limit these valorization processes. Much emphasis will also be placed on evaluating the stability and biosafety of the new products obtained, as well as the agronomic performance and environmental footprint of their production.

The project will include 5 regional Living Labs, one of them in Catalonia, with the participation of actors representing the entire food industry value chain. The activity of these Living Labs will help the project results to have a real impact on the sector, creating contact spaces in which project partners and companies and other end users will evaluate the project solutions proposed by DeliSoil.