A Crop Production Ecology (CPE) Approach to Sustainable Production of Biomass for Food, Feed and Fuel

Abstract

With the rapid increase in demand for agricultural products for food, feed and fuel, concerns are growing about sustainability issues. Can agricultural production meet the needs of increasing numbers of people consuming more animal products and using a larger share of crops as fuel for transport, electricity and heat, while still sustaining the natural resource base? In addition to economic models and learning from statistics and trends, there is a perceived need for decision support tools at global, field and plant levels and for the certification of best practices based on crop production ecology (CPE). This paper illustrates the need for and availability of a generic approach to sustainability principles, criteria, indicators and norms to ensure maximum efficiency in the use of resources such as land, water, chemicals and energy in crop biomass production at various levels of scale. The authors propose a method based on a transportable CPE approach, covering ranges of commodities and environments, to address choices in agricultural production: which crop to promote where, how it should be grown to optimize the efficient use of resources, how to certify the best practices and which crop properties need genetic improvement to make the best use of scarce resources in adverse conditions.

Developing environmental principles, criteria, indicators and norms for potato production in South Africa through field surveys and modelling

“…Each of these indicators have values of actual and desired levels of resource use efficiency. Haverkort et al (2009) described through a crop production ecology approach of sustainable crop production how sustainability indicator values expressed as resource use efficiencies may range from an unacceptably low value to an acceptable level of sustainability (Fig. 2).…”

Sustainability Indicators for Biobased Product Manufacturing: A Systematic Review

“…In the reviewed papers, several mentioned quantifying nutrient content (Diamantopoulou et al, 2016;McBride et al, 2011;Oliveira et al, 2013;Thevathasan et al, 2014). They also looked into other soil health issues, including standing tree biomass; soil organic carbon; pH; dehydrogenase activity (the total range of oxidative activity of soil microflora) (Järvan et al, 2014;Wolińska & Stępniewska, 2012), expressed in units of μg TTC/g h, based on the triphenyltetrazolium chloride method (Lin et al, 2017); fluorescein diacetate (FDA) hydrolysis (μg FDA/g h), a measure of enzyme activity; and bulk density (g/cm 3 ) (Burli et al, 2016;Diamantopoulou et al, 2016;Diaz-Balteiro et al, 2017;Fortună et al, 2012;Gaitan-Cremaschi et al, 2015;Haverkort et al, 2009;Kudoh et al, 2015;McBride et al, 2011;Oliveira et al, 2013;Rasmussen et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2017;Vaidya & Mayer, 2016). The papers also track soil balance to estimate total nutrients as import minus export, nitrogen mineralization, and rate and estimation of carbon release and sequestration (CO 2 -C/g) (Oliveira et al, 2013;Rasmussen et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2017).…”

“…Severe erosion can result in flooding due to poor porosity-a reduced capacity to retain water-and drought (Sheppard, 2017;WWF, 2017). Therefore, the second indicator identified was total erosion (expressed as amount of soil lost per hectare per year) (Haverkort et al, 2009;Oliveira et al, 2013;Rasmussen et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2017;Thevathasan et al, 2014;Valdez-Vazquez et al, 2017), which involves quantifying and combating the problem of erosion in agricultural fields.…”

“…This category is linked not only to land, but also labor, capital, and soil properties. Specifically, influences such as land use change, area of cultivation, and soil quality (e.g., colloidal properties of humic substances and color) determine the yield of a given crop in any given year (Burli et al, 2016;Diamantopoulou et al, 2016;Fortună et al, 2012;Gaitan-Cremaschi et al, 2015;Haverkort et al, 2009;Karvonen et al, 2017;Kudoh et al, 2015;Lal et al, 2011;Rasmussen et al, 2017;Vaidya & Mayer, 2016;Valdez-Vazquez et al, 2017). For a more intricate perspective, the concept of multiple factor productivity can be considered, which looks into an array of indexes in relation to both input and output values (Council, 2012;Rehman, 2014).…”

The Potato Ontology: Delimitation of the Domain, Modelling Concepts, and Prospects of Performance

“…Companies are looking for indicators of sustainability (Haverkort et al, 2009) and wonder if an ontology helps Certifying agencies are accredited to give a farm or a product a label certifying that the producer complies with the requirement of the label (Haverkort 2008). These may be labels issued by a processing or retail company, by environmental nongovernmental organisations or related to organic farming.…”