N-CIRCLE: Virtual Joint Centre for Closed-Loop Cycling of Nitrogen in Chinese Agriculture

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China's agriculture is increasing its productivity and developing rapidly, but low efficiency of N use through overfertilization with N, increasingly threatens its sustainability (Duan et al., 2014). This situation is exacerbated by a vast number of small decentralized farms, inadequate knowledge or equipment, and a weak agronomic extension service (Fan et al., 2012). Agriculture in the UK, by contrast has had static production for twenty years but has built a strong knowledge-base and infrastructure for pollution control. A China-UK VJC on agricultural N use will deliver realistic short-to-medium term solutions for both countries: intensified crop productivity supported by near-closed-loop N cycling (Shock & Shock, 2012). This will advance the economic development and welfare of China's rural regions into the foreseeable future.The key challenge is to integrate and develop synergies between disparate technologies. The 'N-Circle' VJC will create a dynamic and lasting multi-disciplinary hub, with a clear vision, to attract, integrate and harness the relevant skills and expertise from the UK and China, to create infrastructure to deliver tight agricultural N cycling in China. In particular, environmental, biological and genetic scientists will combine with specialists in agronomic extension to form teams that share and develop a multi-scale approach, implemented through the Cool Farm Tool (CFT) for both commercial and scientific purposes. The CFT is already bi-lingual (English and Mandarin), so will be used to identify crucial points for intervention, to elicit targeted innovations, to explain and promote their adoption, and to assess their impacts. N-Circle will work across physical scales, across scales of ambition, and across scales of experience, so that its agenda for change is dynamic, ongoing and lasting. Each of its research and extension activities will involve bilateral exchanges and training to build technical expertise, to maximise synergies, build research capacity and enthuse the science leaders of the future. An intensive outreach programme will engage with regional agricultural communities throughout, to achieve rapid change through recognition and adoption of the N-Circle concepts and philosophy within agriculture and among consumers. Exciting technological synergies are feasible if the potential power of multiple innovations in molecular, chemical, micro-biological, agronomic and engineering technologies can be integrated and up-scaled into economically viable systems at field, farm and regional scales. N-Circle will (i) stimulate targeted innovations at leading UK and Chinese research laboratories, (ii) integrate them on 'case study' farms and in typical catchments, supported by the CFT and other models that validate economic and environmental impacts, and local teams to facilitate two-way knowledge exchange (KE) between industry and science, and (iii) will establish a quality mark to recognise and accredit tight N cycling practices in China. The ultimate outcomes of the 'N-Circle' VJC will be (i) a widespread belief that future intensification of Chinese agriculture can be based on sustainable N cycling, with N inputs and N emissions both minimised, and (ii) an agenda to realise that belief.Several immediate technological opportunities make this an apt time for progress in tighter N cycling in China, including (i) availability of understanding, inhibitors and machinery to manipulate soil microbiology, (ii) renewed interest in legume-based rotations, and commercial availability of endophytic diazotrophs as non-legume inoculants, (iii) enhanced computing power to summarise intensive datasets on crop dynamics, as well as genetics and environmental emissions, (iv) global positioning infrastructure supported by a data processing revolution that enables spatial experimentation, (v) genetic transformation technology that enables harvested crop proteins to be tailored closely to end-user requirements.