Interactive life cycle assessment framework to evaluate agricultural impacts and benchmark emission reduction credits from organic management

Growers who manage farming systems organically strive to maintain balanced ecosystems for sustainable food production. We examined a life cycle assessment framework to support an interactive evaluation and benchmarking of emission reduction credits (ERC) from organically managed crop production. Open source Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) software was used to streamline inventories for organic farming. The inventories were built on hierarchical levels of inputs, land operations, crops and crop rotation. The methodology was demonstrated by comparing: (1) only carbon footprints of the baseline inventories and land operations, then (2) all environmental impacts of organic potato production versus US conventional potato production and other inventoried international potato production systems to highlight effects of management differences. The footprints of inventoried land operations showed trade-off effects between the size of equipment and the degree of plant residue incorporation into soil, e.g. by shredding. Total impact and ecotoxicity impacts per kg potato production were reduced approximately three orders of magnitude on the US organic case study farm as compared to the inventoried US average conventional production. The examined LCA supports the benchmarking of ERC from organic management. It is, therefore, recommended to use the framework in future case studies of organic farms and comparative LCA's.