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      Improving farming practices reduces the carbon footprint of spring wheat production

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          Abstract

          Wheat is one of the world’s most favoured food sources, reaching millions of people on a daily basis. However, its production has climatic consequences. Fuel, inorganic fertilizers and pesticides used in wheat production emit greenhouse gases that can contribute negatively to climate change. It is unknown whether adopting alternative farming practices will increase crop yield while reducing carbon emissions. Here we quantify the carbon footprint of alternative wheat production systems suited to semiarid environments. We find that integrating improved farming practices (that is, fertilizing crops based on soil tests, reducing summerfallow frequencies and rotating cereals with grain legumes) lowers wheat carbon footprint effectively, averaging −256 kg CO 2 eq ha −1 per year. For each kg of wheat grain produced, a net 0.027–0.377 kg CO 2 eq is sequestered into the soil. With the suite of improved farming practices, wheat takes up more CO 2 from the atmosphere than is actually emitted during its production.

          Abstract

          Wheat is the world’s second most favoured food source, yet its production has climatic consequences. Here the authors quantify the carbon footprint of wheat production systems and evaluate potential alternative farming practices, with a reduced negative impact on climate.

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          Most cited references5

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          Greenhouse gases in intensive agriculture: contributions of individual gases to the radiative forcing of the atmosphere

          Agriculture plays a major role in the global fluxes of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. From 1991 to 1999, we measured gas fluxes and other sources of global warming potential (GWP) in cropped and nearby unmanaged ecosystems. Net GWP (grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per square meter per year) ranged from 110 in our conventional tillage systems to -211 in early successional communities. None of the annual cropping systems provided net mitigation, although soil carbon accumulation in no-till systems came closest to mitigating all other sources of GWP. In all but one ecosystem, nitrous oxide production was the single greatest source of GWP. In the late successional system, GWP was neutral because of significant methane oxidation. These results suggest additional opportunities for lessening the GWP of agronomic systems.
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            Radically rethinking agriculture for the 21st century.

            Population growth, arable land and fresh water limits, and climate change have profound implications for the ability of agriculture to meet this century's demands for food, feed, fiber, and fuel while reducing the environmental impact of their production. Success depends on the acceptance and use of contemporary molecular techniques, as well as the increasing development of farming systems that use saline water and integrate nutrient flows.
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              Trading carbon for food: global comparison of carbon stocks vs. crop yields on agricultural land.

              Expanding croplands to meet the needs of a growing population, changing diets, and biofuel production comes at the cost of reduced carbon stocks in natural vegetation and soils. Here, we present a spatially explicit global analysis of tradeoffs between carbon stocks and current crop yields. The difference among regions is striking. For example, for each unit of land cleared, the tropics lose nearly two times as much carbon (∼120 tons·ha(-1) vs. ∼63 tons·ha(-1)) and produce less than one-half the annual crop yield compared with temperate regions (1.71 tons·ha(-1)·y(-1) vs. 3.84 tons·ha(-1)·y(-1)). Therefore, newly cleared land in the tropics releases nearly 3 tons of carbon for every 1 ton of annual crop yield compared with a similar area cleared in the temperate zone. By factoring crop yield into the analysis, we specify the tradeoff between carbon stocks and crops for all areas where crops are currently grown and thereby, substantially enhance the spatial resolution relative to previous regional estimates. Particularly in the tropics, emphasis should be placed on increasing yields on existing croplands rather than clearing new lands. Our high-resolution approach can be used to determine the net effect of local land use decisions.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Pub. Group
                2041-1723
                18 November 2014
                : 5
                : 5012
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Gansu Provincial Key Laboratory for Aridland Crop Science, Gansu Agricultural University , Lanzhou 730070, China
                [2 ]Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada , Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada S9H 3X2
                [3 ]Pollutant Inventories and Reporting Division, Environment Canada , 9th floor, Fontaine Building, 200 Sacré-Coeur, Gatineau, Québec, Canada K1A 0H3
                [4 ]Saskatoon Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada , Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 0X2
                [5 ]Eastern Cereal and Oilseed Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada , 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0C6
                Author notes
                Article
                ncomms6012
                10.1038/ncomms6012
                4243251
                25405548
                5c04d0ec-3665-4ebd-8776-126d775eb123
                Copyright © 2014, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved.

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 09 May 2014
                : 18 August 2014
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