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

GROUP 4, SESSION B: CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
94. Using life cycle analysis to compare the environmental
performance of organic and conventional apple orchards
Aude Alaphilippe 1,* , Sylvaine Simon 1 , Laurent Brun 1 , Frank Hayer 2 , Gérard Gaillard 2
1 2
INRA, UERI Domaine de Gotheron, 26320 Saint Marcel les Valence, France, Agroscope Reckenholz
*
Tanikon ART, CH-8046 Zurich, Switzerland, Corresponding author. E-mail:
aude.alaphilippe@avignon.inra.fr
Although the conventional farming system for apple production remains the common practice worldwide,
the organic farming system is developing. Although organic farming is generally claimed to be environmentally
friendly, very few global assessments of the environmental impacts of organic orchard systems are
presently available. In this work, we analyse with life cycle analysis (LCA) weak and strong points of the
environmental performance of two organic and one conventional apple orchards, using a pluri-annual dataset
from experimental orchard systems located in the middle Rhone valley in France. The analysis was performed
with the SALCA method (SALCA-Crop, V3.1 adapted for pome fruit) and included relevant impact
categories using characterisation models mainly from the methods EDIP97 and CML01.
Seven impact categories including ecotoxicity and human toxicity, as well as energy consumption and other
environmental impact categories were calculated and are here presented. From this first insight, the organic
systems were globally less impacting than the conventional system when considering the functional unit
(FU) per hectare (ha*year), but among the highest impact –except for toxicity- when considering the
(kg*year) FU because of low yields. High-yield conventional systems globally presented the opposite trend.
The basic substitution of conventional by organic inputs or mechanical work was not sufficient to radically
improve the overall environmental performance of the orchard system. This work also highlighted the importance
of the cultivar in the orchard design towards more environmentally friendly apple production systems;
a disease-susceptible cultivar such as Golden Delicious was more impacting than a low-susceptibility cultivar
such as Melrose under the same cropping system. Only one-year results are here presented, to be further
validated after several years of full production.
This study is the first apple LCA based on a multi-year system experiment, which provided all information
requested to compute a LCA in a liable and high quality dataset, as it was collected on purpose in orchards
under the same influence of the site or field context and management. The interest of such system experiments
to create references for agricultural productions newly assessed with LCA methodology is discussed.
Moreover the potential contribution of LCA to the design of innovative and less input dependant production
systems is analysed: the calculation of the overall environmental impact potential (no focus on one aspect) of
different farming systems, followed by an analysis of their weak and strong points, permits to propose some
improvement of the farming systems.
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