Global Nitrogen Innovation Center for Clean Energy and the Environment

The CAFE Framework (Cropping–Animal-crop–Food–Ecosystem) is a hierarchical nutrient accounting framework designed to quantify nitrogen and phosphorus flows across interconnected agricultural and environmental systems.

The framework was developed to address a major limitation in traditional nutrient management approaches: the tendency to focus only on croplands while overlooking the broader food, urban, and ecosystem systems that strongly influence nutrient redistribution and environmental outcomes.

CAFE consists of four nested systems:
1. Cropping system
2. Animal-crop system
3. Food system
4. Landscape ecosystem  

Together, these systems provide a more complete understanding of nutrient dynamics and opportunities for sustainability transitions.

• Management boundary: Cropland.
• Primary inputs: fertilizer, atmospheric deposition to cropland, biological nitrogen fixation, and manure.
• Primary productive outputs: feed crops and non-feed crop products.
• Dominant nutrient dynamic added at this level: crop nitrogen uptake from soil.
• Typical stakeholders: farmers, fertilizer and seed industries, research and extension communities, and government agencies.
• Strategic focus: best management practices that raise nutrient use efficiency and reduce surplus.

• Management boundary: Cropland, pasture, and livestock.
• Primary inputs: fertilizer, deposition, fixation and biosolids applied across cropland and pasture, plus imported feed. Manure is not counted as an input at this level. Once livestock are inside the system boundary, manure is an internal flow returning to cropland, and counting it again would double-count nitrogen that already entered as feed.
• Primary productive outputs: non-feed crop products and animal products.
• Dominant nutrient dynamic added at this level: feed production, feed transfer, manure recycling, and livestock nutrient conversion.
• Typical stakeholders: farmers, agricultural industries, researchers, and government.
• Strategic focus: reintegration of crop and livestock systems, improved manure recycling, improved feed efficiency, and more balanced production portfolios.

• Management boundary: food, fiber, and crop-based biofuel supply chain.
• Primary inputs: all inputs to the Animal-crop system plus imported food, fiber, and crop-based biofuel.
• Primary productive outputs: food, fiber, and biofuel for domestic consumption and export.
• Dominant nutrient dynamic added at this level: transformation and loss from production to consumption.
• Typical stakeholders: farmers, agricultural industries, processors, retailers, researchers, and government.
• Strategic focus: improved storage, transport, processing efficiency, reduced food waste, and better alignment between production and consumption.

• Management boundary: food-fiber-biofuel supply chain plus industry, human waste, and natural habitat.
• Primary inputs: food-system inputs across the whole landscape, including atmospheric deposition to urban and natural land and urban fertilizer, plus imported feed and food. Biosolids are not counted again at this level, because at landscape scale they are nutrients already within the system returning to land.
• Primary productive outputs: exported food, fiber, and crop-based biofuel products.
• Dominant nutrient dynamic added at this level: biogeochemical movement of nutrients from terrestrial systems to streams, estuaries, and the broader environment.
• Typical stakeholders: all above plus wastewater operators, energy and transportation sectors, and broader public agencies.
• Strategic focus: integration of agricultural productivity with ecosystem function, nutrient interception and treatment, sewage treatment and recycling, and reduction of non-agricultural emissions