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Nutrient recycling potential of excreta for global crop and grassland production

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 99–111 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Nutrient recycling from wastes to agriculture can contribute to food production by closing yield gaps, yet the global amount of poorly utilized nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) in excreta at a subnational scale has been insufficiently explored. The global amounts found in human excreta and poorly utilized livestock excreta represent 16% (±7%), 8% (±9%) and 14% (±6%) of crop and grassland N, P and K needs, respectively. National recycling of nutrients in poorly utilized excreta could reduce global net imports of mineral fertilizers by 41% N, 3% P and 36% K. In countries where nutrient supply through locally available livestock excreta and mineral fertilizers do not meet nutrient requirements by crops and grasslands, the recycling of poorly utilized excreta could reduce this difference by, on average, 20% N, 11% P and 13% K, therefore contributing to the move towards a circular economy between food consumption and agriculture.

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Fig. 1: Global application of nutrients as mineral fertilizer and nutrient requirements by crops and grasslands compared with global accrual in human and livestock excreta.
Fig. 2: Surveyed countries, including those with low mean fertilization rate relative to global average, have N, P and K in poorly utilized livestock excreta.
Fig. 3: The unbalanced spatial location of nutrients contained in livestock and human excreta compared with crop and grassland nutrient requirements.
Fig. 4: Relationship between country-wide nitrogen fertilizer use and the proportion of poorly-utilized nitrogen.
Fig. 5: Comparison of balances between mineral fertilizer application and nutrients in human and livestock excreta.
Fig. 6: Comparison between the amounts of N, P and K in poorly utilized excreta and their net imports.

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Data availability

All data used in this manuscript were obtained from publicly available data described in the Methods and calculations are available in the Supplementary Information. Livestock density maps can be found at the Harvard Dataverse repository https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/glw_3, with the identifiers https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GIVQ75, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OCPH42, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/33N0JG, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BLWPZN, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SUFASB and https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ICHCBH. The national average supply of protein and calories to human population data are available from FAOSTAT database at https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FS. The GeoTIFF files for crop yield and harvested area were retrieved from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/PRFF8V and https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PRFF8V. Crop-specific coefficients for biological nitrogen fixation estimation are found at https://www.ifastat.org/nutrient-use-efficiency. Grassland net primary production maps are available at https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod17a3hv006/, whereas the pasture area GeoTIFF file can be found at http://www.earthstat.org/cropland-pasture-area-2000/ and https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GB002952 and the shapefile mapping the global distribution of grasslands per type is available at https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/world-grassland-types. The monthly averaged data on air temperature were retrieved from the C3S CDS database at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7. Finally, the data on mineral fertilizer production, imports, exports and use were obtained from the FAOSTAT database at https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RFN.

Code availability

The R markdown for data analysis and mapping is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

M.D. acknowledges financial support from Centre Mondial de l’Innovation Roullier under the fellowship agreement number OSP 90583.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Soil and Crop Sciences, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Mariana Devault, Dominic Woolf & Johannes Lehmann

  2. Plant Nutrition, Research and Development Department, Centre Mondial de l’Innovation Roullier, Saint-Malo, France

    Mariana Devault

  3. Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Dominic Woolf & Johannes Lehmann

  4. Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA), Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Dominic Woolf & Johannes Lehmann

  5. Department of Global Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Johannes Lehmann

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Contributions

M.D., J.L. and D.W. conceptualized and designed the study. M.D. collected the data and prepared the online supporting material. With help from D.W., M.D. led the data processing and analysis. M.D. and J.L. prepared the first draft of the paper. M.D., J.L. and D.W. contributed to writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Johannes Lehmann.

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M.D. was employed by Groupe Roullier. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Devault, M., Woolf, D. & Lehmann, J. Nutrient recycling potential of excreta for global crop and grassland production. Nat Sustain 8, 99–111 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01467-8

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