Three farms turning waste into something else, what circular bioeconomy looks like in practice

In rural Latvia, sturgeon are raised in tanks of warm water. The water is warm because it sits next to a 2 MW biogas plant. The plant runs on slurry from 4,000 cattle. The digestate left behind goes back on the fields as fertiliser, and the crops the fields grow feed the cattle. One family farm. Four interlocking businesses. None of them throws much of anything away.

The Latvia farm is one of ten profiled in a new FAO report on agricultural bioeconomy in Europe and Central Asia (Kacprzak, Abueisa & Arnés García, 2026). The report covers a wider geographic and conceptual range than the term "bioeconomy" usually does in EU policy documents. Three of the cases are worth walking through in detail because each shows a different mechanism for what the term actually does on the ground. One closes the loop inside a single ownership structure. One changes a single agronomic practice and lets the savings compound across thousands of farms. One stretches the definition into fiber and textile production through a cooperative model. The principle is the same in all three. The execution is not.

The wider context for these examples is the circular bioeconomy framework, which treats biological inputs as resources to keep moving through the system rather than being discarded.

Latvia, four businesses under one roof

AS Ziedi JP is a family enterprise in Latvia, farming 3,000 hectares with 4,000 head of cattle, of which 2,000 are dairy cows. The biogas plant sits at the center of the operation. It runs cogeneration of electricity and heat at 2 MW, with cattle slurry as the feedstock.

The output side is what makes the case interesting. Digestate, the nutrient-rich by-product of anaerobic digestion, is applied to the fields as organic fertilizer, in either liquid or dried form. That replaces a meaningful share of the synthetic fertilizer the farm would otherwise buy in. The crops that those fields grow then feed the cattle, which produce the slurry that fuels the biogas plant. The loop closes inside the farm gate.

Surplus heat from the biogas plant is the part most farms would simply vent. Ziedi recovers it and uses it to warm water for fish farming, specifically eel and sturgeon. Aquaculture, in this case integrated multi-trophic aquaculture thinking applied to a land-based farm, becomes the fourth income stream alongside crops, livestock, and energy.

The farm employs around 100 people and works with Wageningen University and Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies on continuous innovation. The report is candid about what makes this difficult to copy. Biogas plants, aquaculture systems, and the heat recovery infrastructure all require significant upfront investment, which is the main barrier for smaller operations. The report also notes that the model can scale down. Smaller modular biogas digesters and community installations pooling slurry from several smallholders can deliver a similar logic at a fraction of the capital cost.

The Latvia case shows the value of single ownership. When the four business segments sit inside one structure, the digestate moves to the fields and the heat moves to the fish tanks without contracts, price negotiation, or transport friction. That is what closes the loop in practice.

Uzbekistan, one practice change scaled across thousands of hectares

The FAO–GEF CACILM-2 project ran in the Bukhara and Kashkadarya regions of Uzbekistan from 2018 to 2024. The agronomy was conservation agriculture: no-till seeding, retention of crop residues as mulch, and rotation built around drought-tolerant and salt-tolerant varieties such as sorghum and legumes. Hydrogel was tested for soil moisture retention. Delivery was through Farmer Field Schools, a peer-to-peer training approach.

The numbers from the project pilots are the part worth keeping:

No-till technology applied on 38,064 hectares, water-saving methods on 11,000 hectares
Water use reduced by 30 to 50% in drought-prone conditions
Production cost for direct-planted winter wheat reduced by 35 to 44%
Net profit per hectare up by over 50% on rainfed dryland
Fuel savings of 60 to 70% per season per farmer
Energy use for soil treatment and planting cut by 35 to 40%
Irrigation savings of 25 to 30%

A separate result, raised-bed no-till planting of winter wheat under irrigated conditions in southern Uzbekistan, cut grain production costs and increased net income by 1.4 times compared with conventional methods.

12,600 farmers were trained over the six years of the project. By the end, the policy uptake matched the field results. Presidential Decree No. 36 (2024) promoted no-till practices on degraded land. A September 2024 Ministry of Agriculture decree mandated conservation tillage on rainfed areas, targeting an additional 12,000 hectares. The investment target attached to the policy is USD 350 million to scale conservation agriculture to 1.5 million hectares by 2035.

There is one bottleneck the report calls out clearly. Affordable no-till seeders are mostly imported from Brazil, and small-scale Uzbek farmers struggle to access them at viable prices. Multinational development banks have been approached for the investment that would support local manufacturing. Until that is resolved, the equipment cost remains the limit on how fast the policy targets can be met.

What the Uzbekistan case shows is different from Latvia. Here the change is to a single agronomic practice, but the savings compound across the entire system. Less fuel, less water, less labour, and higher yield per hectare, multiplied by 38,000 hectares now and 1.5 million hectares targeted, is what makes this a bioeconomy story rather than a soil management story. The reduced energy and input use is the bioeconomy benefit. The yields are the business case.

Türkiye, weaving as a bioeconomy

The Lycia women's cooperative was founded in 2021 in southern Türkiye. The work is weaving Dastar, a traditional fabric produced by a technique dating back roughly a thousand years and recently awarded geographical-indication status. The materials are organic-certified cotton, linen, and hemp, all sourced from inside Türkiye. Yarns are washed in flour to improve elasticity and either dyed with natural dyes or left in their natural color.

Numbers from the FAO case study:

50 women trained between 2021 and 2023 in partnership with the TUI Care Foundation
12 cooperative board members and 1,480 registered project partners
30 full-time positions covering office and field operations through municipal employment
More than 500 people have benefited from cooperative services so far
10 fashion shows held showcasing modernized Dastar garments

The Looms of Lycia project (2021–2023) set up new weaving workshops in two villages where Dastar is traditionally made. Garments produced through the project were sold in cooperative shops and nearby hotels. The cooperative itself is committed to fully fair-trade sourcing and prioritizes local suppliers, including public training centers, the municipality, the regional chamber of commerce, and local tailors and weavers, many of whom were trained through the cooperative's own programs.

The activities that sit alongside the weaving are part of the same biobased frame. The cooperative grows gluten-free buckwheat on inactive agricultural land provided by the municipality. It runs the first chicken farm in Türkiye to raise poultry on hemp bedding without pesticides. Eggs from the chicken farm are distributed free to preschool children every day. A community food centre serves hot meals to vulnerable residents.

This case is in the FAO report because it stretches the working definition of bioeconomy in a useful direction. Most readers will associate the term with biogas, biofuels, and biorefineries. Lycia shows the same logic, locally sourced biobased inputs, a closed regional value chain, and substitution of synthetics with natural materials, applied to fibres and textiles. Same principle, different output. The cooperative model also resolves one of the barriers that limits replication elsewhere. By bundling production, training, and social services inside a single non-profit structure with municipal employment for 30 staff, Lycia removes the upfront-capital problem that constrains most biogas and aquaculture projects.

What the three have in common

The pattern in all three cases is the same. Inputs and outputs that look asymmetrical at first sit in productive relationships once the system is designed for it. Cattle slurry to electricity to heat to fish. Crop residue to soil cover to lower water use to higher yields. Hemp to textile to chicken bedding to eggs to school meals.

Scale varies enormously. Lycia is a cooperative with 1,480 registered partners. The CACILM-2 project covers 38,000 hectares and is on a policy track to 1.5 million. Ziedi is a single farm of 3,000 hectares running four businesses. The social arrangement varies just as much. A women's cooperative in Türkiye, a state-backed pilot program in Uzbekistan, a single-family enterprise in Latvia.

The barriers are similar across cases. The FAO report flags three repeatedly:

Upfront capital. Biogas plants, aquaculture systems, and no-till seeders all cost real money to install. Smaller operations need cooperative structures, pooled investment, or subsidy programs to access them.
Knowledge and advisory gaps. Integrated systems require operator training that is not part of standard agricultural extension. The Farmer Field School approach in Uzbekistan and the university partnerships at Ziedi are both responses to this.
Regulatory fragmentation. Rules on renewable energy, organic fertilizers, and aquaculture differ widely between countries. That slows replication and adds friction every time a model crosses a border.

What the report concludes is that none of the ten projects scaled on technical merit alone. Subsidies, public-private partnerships, university partnerships, and policy support did the work of moving practice into adoption. The agronomy and the engineering were necessary but not sufficient.

The seven cases not covered here

The report covers seven other farms worth reading in the original. Austria's GRAND FARM is a 90-hectare regenerative organic operation, the first market garden in Europe to receive Regenerative Organic Certification, growing 60 different crops. Finland's Palopuro Agroecological Symbiosis is a multi-enterprise network around the 340-hectare Knehtilä farm, including the first biogas plant ever built on a crop farm in Finland. Armenia's ORWACO produces vermicompost from organic residues using Californian red worms, with a documented 12.9% potato yield increase over mineral NPK fertilizer in field trials. Kazakhstan's Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology runs a phytoremediation and bioremediation pilot on land contaminated by decades of organochlorine pesticide use, with combined plant, microbial, and biochar treatments. Moldova's Porco Bello operates the country's second-largest pig farm with a biogas plant producing 600 kW per hour from manure. Serbia's LoginEKO is a 3,700-hectare data-driven legume-based farm supplying 8,700–9,800 tonnes of organic grain per year. Tajikistan's Almosi Valley pastoralism, based on Hissar sheep transhumance, is a candidate for recognition as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System.