LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 4C: CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
French agricultural practices traceability system employed for
environmental assessment
Pauline Maupu 1 ,,Amandine Berthoud 1 , Ophélie Negri 1 , Edith Martin 2 , Seheno Ratsimbazafy 2 , Noëllie
Oudet 2 , Antoine Poupart 1
1 InVivo AgroSolutions, Direction Agriculture Durable et Développement, 83 av. de la Grande Armée, 75782 Paris Cedex 16, France
2 Bio Intelligence Service, 20-22 Villa Deshayes, 75014 Paris, France
Corresponding author. E-mail: pmaupu@invivo-group.com
ABSTRACT
InVivo, a French agricultural cooperatives union, has developed and implemented decision-making tools to help farmers manage
fertilisation and plant protection. These tools enable pedologic, climatologic and agronomic data collection for each agricultural field
on a farm, creating a traceability system allowing for field-scale LCA indicators calculation.
An LCA was conducted on winter wheat crop based on real agricultural practices for crops harvested in 2009, involving six cooperatives,
13941 fields, and covering 95432ha in production basins across France. Several indicators were calculated: water consumption,
greenhouse gas emissions, marine and freshwater eutrophication, primary energy consumption, acidification, freshwater ecotoxicity.
Every practice necessary for grain production and harvest was considered: cultivation, sowing, fertiliser and pesticide production and
application, fuel consumption. Transportation to the grain silo and storage were subsequently considered.
The main conclusions are: (1) regarding impacts on freshwater ecotoxicity, pesticide use and fertiliser use are predominant, (2) regarding
the other LCA indicators, fertiliser production and fertiliser use are predominant (3) results are highly scattered when observed
among fields; much less among production basins (4) results depend on the product’s technological quality.
The next step will be to identify ways to improve LCA results indicator by indicator by improving agricultural practices. InVivo’s
advice and decision-making tools prove suitable for mass traceability and mass environmental impacts minimization.
Keywords: Agricultural LCA, Ecodesign, wheat, traceability, mass improvement
1. Introduction
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the leading methodology for the environmental impact assessment of a
product for two main reasons: it allows for the calculation of several indicators corresponding to different
environmental impacts (global warming, eutrophication, primary resources depletion…), and takes into account
all relevant steps of the life cycle of a product, from the production of raw materials to the end of life.
When it comes to agricultural products, data collection constitutes a real stake. Indeed 1 kg of wheat grain
sold contains wheat coming from several farms, from several fields. Each of these fields is managed following
different agricultural practices and under different pedoclimatic conditions.
In light of the growing concern of the food industry for environmental responsibility, it becomes more
and more important for their suppliers to know specifically what the impact of the raw products they produce
is. This knowledge must cover the raw products variability, taking into account their production conditions,
their technological quality…
For example, regionally aggregated data on wheat production and its potential impacts are not likely to be
representative of the cooperatives members’ data within the same region: mean regional data do not convey
the fact that cooperatives are passing information, advice and tools on to their members, effectively influencing
their way of producing wheat, as well as other agricultural products. Thus, it appears that using fieldscale
recorded data on real practices would be the best solution for cooperatives who want to assess the potential
impacts of their own products. In addition, the field scale is relevant for impact assessment because
that is the scale at which farmers make decisions and it is also the scale that allows aggregation at higher
scales such as the farm or the production basin.
Thus, most LCA studies on agricultural products come up against the issue of obtaining real data on agricultural
practices. The potential impacts of agricultural products are indeed closely related to those agricultural
practices: inputs (fertiliser, fuel and pesticides) consumption vary a lot between fields, as well as yield
and emissions that are highly dependent on both agricultural practices and pedoclimatic conditions.
InVivo is a French union of agricultural cooperatives that produces and sells, among other products and
services, decision-making tools to help farmers manage fertilisation and pesticide application. With the help
of cooperatives and thanks to these tools, pedologic, climatologic and agronomic (in particular fertilisation
and pesticide applications practices) data is collected and recorded for each agricultural plot of a farm.
The main objectives of this study are (1) to assess the environmental impact of winter wheat, using a Life
Cycle Assessment (LCA) covering field practices, transport and storage of the grains until the grain is sold to
a miller, (2) to identify the most impacting phases of the winter wheat life cycle, (3) to study the scattering of
the impact indicators results at two scales: field scale and production basin scale (4) to examine the effect of
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