Rice‐Animal Co‐Culture Systems Benefit Global Sustainable Intensification.

Producing more food with less pollution and greenhouse gas emissions is a grand challenge for the 21st century. Strategies to successfully promote win‐win outcomes for both food security and environmental health are not easy to identify. Here we comprehensively assess an ecological rice‐animal co‐culture system (RAC) (e.g., rice‐fish, rice‐duck, and rice‐crayfish) through a global meta‐analysis and identify the potential benefits of global promotion. Compared to traditional monoculture of rice or animal production, the RAC can not only reduce the demand for agricultural land areas, but also increase rice yields (+4%) as well as nitrogen use efficiency of rice (+6%). At the same time, RAC reduces nitrogen losses (−16% runoff and −13% leaching) and methane emissions (−11%), except for rice‐fish coculture systems, which are likely to increase methane emissions (+29%). Furthermore, RAC increases the net income of farmers through reducing cost of fertilizer and pesticide input and achieving higher outputs with more marketable products. According to the development stage of different countries, promotion of RAC will thus realize multiple benefits and aid sustainable intensification. Plain Language Summary: How to feed the growing world population with less pollution is a grand challenge for the 21st century. Rice‐animal co‐culture systems present an ecological integrated farming approach to tackle the challenge. Through a global consensus by synthesizing evidence from existing literature, we found that rice‐animal co‐culture systems could produce more diverse food types and nutrient sources, enhance resource use efficiency and reduce methane emissions, while increasing farmers' income. Global promotion of rice‐animal coculture system has the potential to benefit sustainable development goals. Key Points: Rice‐animal co‐culture systems could produce more diverse food with higher rice yield and extra animal proteinGlobal promotion of rice‐animal co‐culture will reduce nitrogen loss and methane emissions from rice paddiesGlobal promotion of rice‐animal co‐culture will increase income of producers by 152–171 billion US dollars annually [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]