Summary

The superfood chlorella can be produced using nutrients from grass cuttings, which are of very low feed value for cattle. An EIP AGRI Operational Group in East Flanders trialled and tested a unique way to locally produce alternative proteins from grass cuttings in a water-saving, vertical agriculture system.

Results

This Operational Group is the first in the world to be able to use grass extract for production scale algae cultivation using a bioreactor.

Conventional algae growing in 10 000 litre water/medium vertical farming requires mineral fertilisers with 0.9 kg N and 0.2 kg P every week and some micronutrients. The Operational Group replaced this with 9.800 litre of water and 200 litre grass extract (no fertilisers).

After one week they could harvest 800 to 1200 grams of chlorella, recycle the water and add 200 litre of grass extract to start the process again.