Multiple pollutants from crop and livestock production in the Yangtze River: status and challenges

Highlights

● Cash crops and livestock production in Yangtze River Basin has grown rapidly.

● The agricultural inputs discharge multiple pollutants loads on water bodies in the YRB.

● Multiple pollutants impact on efficient utilization of nitrogen and phosphorus in agriculture.

● An explicitly multi-pollutant approach accounting for interactions is need.

Abstract

The rapid increase in the proportion of cash crops and livestock production in the Yangtze River Basin has led to commensurate increases in fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Excessive application of chemical fertilizer, organophosphorus pesticides and inappropriate disposal of agricultural waste induced water pollution and potentially threaten Agriculture Green Development (AGD). To ensure food security and the food supply capacity of the Yangtze River Basin, it is important to balance green and development, while ensuring the quality of water bodies. Multiple pollutants affect the transfer, adsorption, photolysis and degradation of each other throughout the soil-plant-water system. This paper considers the impact of multi-pollutants on the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles especially for crops, which are related to achieving food security and AGD. It presents prospective on theory, modeling and multi-pollutant control in the Yangtze River Basin for AGD that are of potential value for other developing regions.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Agriculture Green Development / crop production / livestock production / multi-pollutant models / multiple pollutants / Yangtze River Basin

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U20A2047 and 42107056), the Key Laboratory of Low-carbon Green Agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), and the State Cultivation Base of Eco-agriculture for Southwest Mountainous Land (Southwest University).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Lihua Ma, Shiyang Li, Linfa Fang, Xuanjing Chen, Ran Xiao, Xiaoxuan Su, Zhaolei Li, Zhaohai Bai, Lin Ma, Prakash Lakshmanan, and Xinping Chen declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)