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
winter wheat technological quality on its environmental impacts. Over all, this study will make it possible to
say whether, as demanding as it may be, LCA based on field-scale data is as worthwhile as is expected.
2. Methods
2.1 Data collection
An LCA was conducted on winter wheat, based on real agricultural practices recorded for winter wheat
harvested in 2009, on a sample of 13 941 fields, covering 95 432 ha in different production basins of France
where six cooperatives, from different regions, collect their wheat. The real agricultural practices were directly
recorded with a tool used by farmers to manage their practices and to carry out their products’ traceability.
To use this tool farmers have to record all their field operations. Through this system, data on pedology
and agricultural practices in each field where the tool is used were gathered in a database and were analysed
using the Statistic Analysis System (SAS) software. Thus, the results of this LCA are representative of
farmers who use such decision-making tools.
The fields were divided into groups, corresponding to the 6 cooperatives’ production basins, which were
then further divided into second-range groups identified by their own agronomic experts. These production
scenarios were thus characterised by different soil conditions and/or by different technologic qualities (protein
content of the grains), i.e. by different agricultural practices. Such a classification allowed for a finer
analysis; however, all results cannot be detailed here for obvious conciseness reasons.
Table 1. Description of the population
Cooperative’s name Number of fields Surface of the sample (hectares)
2.2 System boundaries
420
Coop 1 437 3 273
Coop 2 2 198 23 701
Coop 3 70 703
Coop 4 1 908 7 831
Coop 5 7 709 50 937
Coop 6 1 619 8 987
The functional unit studied here is “1 kg of wheat grain, ready to be exported from the cooperative”.
Figure 4. Studied winter wheat production system.
The agricultural practices considered in this study are cultivation, sowing, fertilising and pesticide application
and fuel consumption on field to produce and harvest the wheat. Ecoinvent 2.0 life cycle inventories
(Nemecek and Kägi, 2007) were used to consider the production of the inputs: wheat seed, fertilisers, pesticides,
fuel, etc.