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

PARALLEL SESSION 1B: TOWARDS LIFE CYCLE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
For the present case study on winter oilseed rape production in the Northern German state Mecklenburg-
West Pomerania, the main data sources were data sets from state office for agricultural research, particularly
the “reference farm monitoring network”, and the state’s annual Agricultural Report (LFA Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern 2009); moreover interviews conducted on five farms, each with 100 – 500 ha of agricultural
area planted with winter oilseed rape. The study’s scope was the sustainability performance of winter oilseed-rape
production in the study region in comparison to production ten years before. We have collected
data sets for the time period 2008 (five-year averages) and 1998; the two alternative product systems compared
are thus the ‘good agricultural practice 2008’ and ‘good agricultural practice 1998’. All assumptions
were verified with the state office for agricultural research (Gülzow) and selected farmers. The functional
unit was defined as the ‘production of 1 ton of oilseed rape, cradle to field border, in Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern, Germany, product water content below 9%, data from 2008 and 1998’. As no by products
(straw) are usually harvested all impacts were allocated to the rape seed. The system boundaries of both the
alternative production scenarios (2008, 1998) are shown in Fig. 1.
Production Seed
Production Pesticides
Production Fertilizers
Production Fuels
Figure 1. System boundaries of the AgBalance case study
Road Transports
Soil Preparation
Farming Processes
3. Results and discussion
We focus here on the discussion of environmental impacts, as these showed the biggest difference between
the two studied systems. The assessment of environmental impacts comprises the global warming potential,
acidification -, ozone depletion -, and photochemical ozone creation potential, as well as emissions to water.
Resource efficiency indicators include pimary energy demand, abiotic resource depletion, (Saling 2002) land
use, (Koellner and Scholz 2007), and water consumption (Pfister 2009). Moreover, we assessed the aquatic
ecotoxicity potential resulting from emissions of pesticides and fertilisers according to Saling et al., (2005);
Summarizing these results, the impacts were significantly lower in the 2008 compared to the 1998 production
system. This partly reflects the fact that rapeseed production on the reference monitoring farms has seen
substantial increase in yields from 1998 to 2008, on average from 2.7 ton/ha to 4.1 ton/ha. As the functional
unit is defined as one ton of rapeseed, the emission flows and exchanges in relation to the reference flow
were lower in the 2008 production system.
AgBalance TM however additionally requires the evaluation of a set of agri-environmental indicators pertaining
to specific biodiversity impacts in agricultural areas. These indicators are quantified per hectare and year,
and have no numerical correlation with the reference flow, in order to show in a transparent way the management
of the agricultural soil.
Drilling
Application of
Pesticides
Fertilizer
Lime
Harvesting
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