Analysis of milk production and greenhouse gas emissions as a function of extreme variations in forage production among French dairy farms.

Many studies that investigate mitigation strategies of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions from farming systems often build farm typologies from average data from multiple farms. Results from farm typologies are useful for general purposes but fail to represent variability in farm characteristics due to management practices or climate conditions, particularly when considering consequences of extreme environmental events. This limitation raises the issue of better distinguishing, within datasets of farms, farms that have average characteristics from those that deviate from average trends, in order to improve assessment of how climate variability influences farm performance.

Improving Estimates of Nitrogen Emissions for Life Cycle Assessment of Cropping Systems at the Scale of an Agricultural Territory.

In life cycle assessment (LCA), simple models are currently used to estimate cropping system nitrogen (N) emissions on farms. At large spatial scales (e.g.

Environmental impacts of French and Brazilian broiler chicken production scenarios: an LCA approach.

This study compared the environmental burdens of two broiler chicken production systems in Brazil and two in France. One Brazilian system represents large-scale production in the Center-West region of the country; the other is a small-scale production in the South. One of the French systems represents an extensive broiler chicken production system, known as "Label Rouge"; the other is a standard system.

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.

An operational method for the evaluation of resource use and environmental impacts of dairy farms by life cycle assessment.

This paper describes and applies EDEN-E, an operational method for the environmental evaluation of dairy farms based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) conceptual framework. EDEN-E requires a modest amount of data readily available on-farm, and thus can be used to assess a large number of farms at a reasonable cost. EDEN-E estimates farm resource use and pollutant emissions mostly at the farm scale, based on-farm-gate balances, amongst others.