Effects of integrated rice-animals co-culture on paddy soil and water properties and rice yield: a meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

Integrated rice-animal co-culture can provide a sustainable alternative to limited arable land and freshwater resources, ensuring a sustainable global food supply in a complementary form. Although most studies have focused on the effect of co-culture systems on soil and water properties and rice yield, the results usually differ from various case studies. The high variability of the results requires a thorough assessment of the different rice-animal co-culture modes. In this meta-analysis, 191 pairs of observations from 80 studies were collected to explore the potential effects of six rice-animal co-culture modes on paddy nutrient supplements and rice yield (RY). The results showed that rice-animal co-culture systems could optimize paddy ecosystem and increase RY by 7.77%. Rice-frog and rice-crayfish systems were better co-culture modes for nutrient retention in soil. Compared with soil, the response of ammonia-nitrogen (NH₄⁺-N) in water is more positive to the response of RY. Our study further confirmed that rice-animal co-culture is environmentally friendly and sustainable agriculture to increase both rice yield and animal protein products by enhancing the concentration of available nutrients and efficient use of the limited water and land resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Rice yield
• integrated rice-animal co-culture system
• nutrient cycling
• sustainable agriculture

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the researchers whose data and work were included in this meta-analysis.

Authors’ contributions

Xing Liu: Writing-original draft, Software, Visualization. Zhao-Ji Shi: Formal analysis, Visualization. Dao-Lin Sun: Investigation, Data curation. Hui Wei: Methodology, Writing-review & editing. Jia-En Zhang: Conceptualization, Writing-review & editing, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Supervision. All authors have agreed and consented to the final version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03650340.2022.2142571

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (Grant no. 2021B0202030002); Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province of China (Grant no. 2019B030301007); Guangdong Provincial Special Project of Rural Revitalization Strategy (Document No. (2021)12); the Joint Team Project of Guangdong Laboratory for Lingnan Modern Agriculture (Grant no. NT2021010); the Innovation Team Construction Project of Modern Agricultural Industry Technology Systems of Guangdong Province (2022KJ105). []