An Evaluation of On-Farm Food Loss Accounting in Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Four California Specialty Crops

Abstract

The majority of the environmental impacts associated with the agri-food supply chain occur at the production phase. Interests in using life-cycle assessment (LCA) for accounting for agri-food supply chains as well as food losses and waste (FLW) has increased in recent years. Here, for the first time, we estimate production-phase embedded resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in California specialty crops considering on-farm food losses. We use primary, survey-derived qualitative and quantitative data to consider on-farm food loss prevention and avoided GHG emissions through two different scenarios applied in an illustrative example for processing peach at the production stage. Further, we contribute a mathematical approach for accounting for discrete, unique flows within the net flow of loss in a supply chain, in LCA. Through the detailed LCAs, we identify the hotspots for the four crops as on-farm diesel use, fertilizer application, direct water use, and electricity for irrigation pumping. Impacts from cultivation practices and the additional impacts from on-farm food losses vary significantly by crop. Including the losses in the LCAs resulted in increases in overall resource use and GHG emissions by 4-38% (percent varies depending on the crop type). We used the LCA models and a set of straightforward calculations to evaluate the environmental impacts of a prevention action (a 50% reduction in on-farm food losses) and the secondary use of end-of-life (EOL) biomass from processing peach. The results of this evaluation showed an 11% reduction in GHG emissions compared to the baseline (full harvest). In conclusion, by explicitly including the impacts of on-farm food losses in LCA, we highlight challenges and opportunities to target interventions that simultaneously reduce these losses and the associated environmental impacts in agricultural systems.

Environmental Assessment of Upgrading Horticultural Side Streams—The Case of Unharvested Broccoli Leaves

“…Previous assessments of vegetable surplus foods have found environmental savings when secondary use of by-products is included. For example, the authors of [38] found that 50% food loss prevention at farm level resulted in about 2% reduction in global warming potential, while including secondary use of peach by-products for energy production decreased global warming potential by 11% in comparison with not accounting for the food loss. Use of available biomass to replace food ingredients was also assessed by [39], who found that using food surplus materials with high nutritional value, such as animal blood or brewer spent grains, as a food ingredient or as animal feed gave greater global warming savings than reusing these materials for energy production or dumping them in landfill.…”

A critical review of on-farm food loss and waste: future research and policy recommendations

“…For example, out of 54 countries with FLW data, only 14 countries were identified to have high confidence data compatible with the Food Waste Index (United Nations Environment Programme, 2021). Further, relying on secondary data does not address the overarching issue which is a lack of primary data of on-farm FLW (Raak et al ., 2017; Kitinoja et al ., 2018; Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2020; McCosker, 2020; Winans et al ., 2020; Ortiz-Gonzalo et al ., 2021; Soma et al ., 2021; World Wildlife Fund-United Kingdom, 2021; Xue et al ., 2021).…”

From Quantifying to Managing Food Loss in the Agri-Food Industry Supply Chain

“…In addition, the concept "system" [27,30,62,65] emphasised the consideration of waste as an intrinsic element of food systems. Other concepts to be highlighted were "waste management" and "prevention", which were directly and indirectly related, respectively, to the food donations that appeared in the second period, and which emphasised the need for the prevention and use of production surpluses or donations to alleviate food insecurity [66].…”

“…The concepts of "shelf life" [64,65,67,68] or "greenhouse gas emissions" [66,67,69,70] were part of the challenges faced by companies and public institutions in the face of the need to reduce food loss already announced in the second period.…”