Integrated emergy, energy and economic evaluation of rice and vegetable production systems in alluvial paddy fields: Implications for agricultural policy in China

Emergy-Based Sustainability Assessment for a Five-in-One Integrated Production System of Apple, Grass, Pig, Biogas, and Rainwater on the Loess Plateau, Northwest China

“…Implementing these strategies not only reduces the emergy demands for pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but also improves the quantity and quality of fruit products and increases the soil organic matter stocks, thereby avoiding the consumption of local nonrenewable natural resources in the form of soil organic matter losses in the FIOIPS. Although the FIOIPS has relatively low cumulative efficiency of soil organic matter compared with the GCIOPS, the former remains superior to a banana production system (2.09E + 05 sej/J) (H. F. Lu et al 2009) and a rice-vegetable rotation growth system (7.09E + 05 sej/J) (H. Lu et al 2010) reported previously.…”

“…Zhang et al 2011); crop systems, such as banana production (de Barros et al 2009), red orange production (La Rosa et al 2008), rice and vegetable production (Lu et al 2010) soybean production (Cavalett and Ortega 2009); and integrated production with coupling of farming and animal husbandry, such as the "grains-pig-fish" production system (Cavalett et al 2006) and "rice-duck" mutualism system (Xi and Qin 2009). Recently, a few emergy-based studies have been focused on biogaslinked agricultural systems in China.…”

Emergy and greenhouse gas assessment of a sustainable, integrated agricultural model (SIAM) for plant, animal and biogas production: Analysis of the ecological recycle of wastes

“…Therefore, the use of renewability helps with in-depth analysis on the potential sustainability of a production system. However, it may be inconvenient to compare previous study results obtained that use different methods to classify inputs into renewable or nonrenewable resources (Lu et al, 2010). Because the inclusion of partial renewabilities is an attempt to include the renewability of each system input (Agostinho and Ortega, 2012), which dramatically affects relevant evaluation results due to the dependence of emergy indices on the classification of renewable and non-renewable resources and the determination of the renewable fraction.…”

“…Examples include production systems for chicken (Castellini et al, 2006;Hu et al, 2012), cattle (Rótolo et al, 2007), and fish (Vassallo et al, 2009;Li et al, 2011;Zhang et al, 2011), banana (De Barros et al, 2009, red orange (La Rosa et al, 2008), four fruits, banana, papaya, guava and wampee (Lu et al, 2009), rice and vegetable (Lu et al, 2010), and soybean (Cavalett and Ortega, 2009). Recently, increasing attention has been paid to integrated agricultural production systems, such as a "grains-pig-fish" production system (Cavalett et al, 2006), a "riceduck" mutualism system (Xi and Qin, 2009), a "four-in-one" peach production system (Wei et al, 2009), a "cattle-biogas-greenhouse vegetables" production system (Wu et al, 2013), and a "pig-biogasfish" system (Wu et al, 2014).…”

Emergy assessment of three home courtyard agriculture production systems in Tibet Autonomous Region, China

“…Emergy Analysis has been applied to different fields, and it has become a promising tool for evaluation of ecological-economic systems (Castellini et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2007;Coppola et al, 2009;Vassallo et al, 2009). In addition, it has been used to assess agricultural production on different scales (Campbell, 2001;Chen et al, 2006;la Rosa et al, 2008;Pizzigallo et al, 2008;Xi and Qin, 2009;Lu et al, 2010).…”