Location and technology options to reduce environmental impacts from agriculture

Production-location and production-technology affect environmental impacts from agriculture and therefore managing these will contribute in the discussion of sustainable agriculture. This research builds on previous research and illustrates the application of current developments in life cycle assessment (LCA) to identify location and technology options to reduce environmental impacts from tomato production systems in Australia. In addition to climate change and water scarcity impacts reported in previous research, this paper presents land use, ecotoxicity and eutrophication footprints based on location specific factors wherever applicable. The results indicated that land use footprints (based on location specific Net Primary Productivity – NPP0 of tomato production systems) varied from 0.03 to 0.2 m2.yr-e for each kg tomato at the farm gate (where 1 m2.yr-e represents 1 m2 of land occupation for 1 year at the global average NPP0). Results for ecotoxicity and eutrophication were up to 500 times that of the normalised results of other environmental indicators for open field cultivation and low-technology greenhouse tomato production systems. Ongoing efforts to quantify location-specific emissions to the environment from the use of pesticides and fertilisers from various production systems, and the development of local/regional characterisation factors in impact assessment, will further progress identification of locations which have the least ecotoxicity and eutrophication impacts. Relocation of greenhouse production to places which require no/limited heating and/or the substitution of fossil fuels in artificial heating by PV are some of the options which should be further discussed for ongoing environmental improvement in vegetable production systems.