Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions of an Indian village - Who's to blame: crops or livestock?

A carbon footprint assessment, combining various scales of analysis and including a territorial assessment, is proposed to estimate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from crops and livestock in an Indian village impacted by both Green (for crops) and White (for milk) revolutions. It is based on the GHG assessment of 10 cropping systems, 8 livestock farming systems and 9 production systems using the comparative agriculture and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approaches. Results show that mineral fertilisation, irrigation and methane from paddy fields are the main drivers of emissions at plot level.

Emergy evaluation of contrasting dairy systems at multiple levels.

Emergy accounting (EmA) was applied to a range of dairy systems, from low-input smallholder systems in South Mali (SM), to intermediate-input systems in two regions of France, Poitou-Charentes (PC) and Bretagne (BR), to high-input systems on Reunion Island (RI). These systems were studied at three different levels: whole-farm (dairy system and cropping system), dairy-system (dairy herd and forage land), and herd (animals only). Dairy farms in SM used the lowest total emergy at all levels and was the highest user of renewable resources.

Pluri-energy analysis of livestock systems--a comparison of dairy systems in different territories.

This paper introduces a generic assessment method called pluri-energy analysis. It aims to assess the types of energy used in agricultural systems and their conversion efficiencies. Four types of energy are considered: fossil energy, gross energy contained in the biomass, energy from human and animal labor and solar energy.

Evaluating the ability of current energy use assessment methods to study contrasting livestock production systems.

Environmental impact assessment of agriculture has received increased attention over recent decades, leading to development of numerous methods. Among them, three deal with energy use: Energy Analysis (EA), Ecological Footprint (EF) and Emergy synthesis (Em). Based on a review of 197 references applying them to a variety of agricultural systems, this paper evaluates their ability to assess energy use.