PROFILE Shao Yap, Aidan Chin, Daniele De Rosa won awards in the inaugural AORA Student Research Awards, with ELB Equipment’s Christopher Malan sponsoring the award through Komptech.
Taking research to market T
THE AORA STUDENT RESEARCH AWARDS FOR ADVANCING ORGANICS RECYCLING HAVE RECOGNISED THREE SCHOLARS FOR CRITICAL EMISSIONS-REDUCTION RESEARCH.
hroughout the 1950s and 60s, the Green Revolution spread worldwide in response to global food shortages cause by population growth, namely through Mexico and the Indian subcontinent. According to a research paper published in PNAS Journal on the Green Revolution, the developing world saw extraordinary food crop productivity gains despite growing land scarcity and rising land values. But in order to achieve such growth, farmers increasingly relied on synthetic nitrogen products, with the perverse outcome being an increase in global emissions. These are the outcomes generated from Dr Daniele De Rosa’s research into optimising organic amendments to reduce emissions. Daniele is part of a research
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team at the Queensland University of Technology and recently won an Australian Organics Recycling Association (AORA) Student Research Award presented at this year’s AORA State Conference. The inaugural awards are sponsored by Komptech and administered by the University of Queensland’s Centre for Recycling of Organic Waste and Nutrients (CROWN). Postgraduate research and runner up categories and honours category were handed to three scholars for a diverse range of organics reuse projects. All project nominations were put forward in collaboration with the respective supervisors at each university. Daniele, winner of the postgraduate research award, conducted research that looked at the possibility of accounting for
nutrient inputs following the use of raw and composted manures in intensive horticulture. This was done in combination with reduced fertiliser inputs without reducing crop yields and without increasing greenhouse gas emissions. His project was part of the National Agricultural Manure Management Program (NAMMP), which was funded by the Federal Government and the intensive animal industries, and aimed to find ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Australia’s agricultural sector. “My main goal is to see sustainable agriculture. If we want to survive on this planet for the next 200 to 300 years, we need to become more sustainable,” Daniele explains. His research explains that during the Green Revolution, farmers had
