The environmental impact of fertilizer embodied in a wheat-to-bread supply chain

Goucher, Liam; Bruce, Richard D.; Cameron, Duncan D.; Koh, S.C. Lenny; Horton, Peter

doi:10.1038/nplants.2017.12

Cited by 88 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Similarly, reducing the yield gap is an active research target since many crop yields have reached a plateau or are even decreasing (Foley et al 2011). Increasingly, however, agricultural research is driven by wider concerns, such as: predicted yield reductions through the effects of climate change and severe weather events (Lesk et al 2016); greenhouse gas emissions associated with the manufacture of nitrogen-based fertilisers and pollution of water courses through run-off (Zhang et al 2015;Goucher et al 2017); and external economic and geopolitical events in connection with another constituent of fertiliser, phosphorus, because it is a finite global resource (Dawson and Hilton 2011;Syers et al 2011). Thus, increasing the availability of nitrogen and phosphorus to plant roots via soil microbe activity has emerged as another research target (Cameron 2010).…”

Section: Environmental and Socio-economic Benefitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…LCA is used extensively in industry to identify 'hotspots' in greenhouse gas emissions (O'Rourke 2014; Hellweg and Canals 2014) and has been applied to food supply chains (Garnett 2014;Goucher et al 2017). An example of such methodology is the Supply Chain Environmental Analysis Tool (SCEnAT), a robust supply chain life-cycle analytical modelling tool which integrates Traditional LCA and Environmental InputOutput LCA, quantifying the environmental impact of human-led activities (Guinee and Heijungs 2011;Koh et al 2012;Horton et al 2016).…”

Section: Quantitative Analysis and Modelling Of Agri-food Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For further details refer to the text Research is therefore urgently needed to find ways to incentivise all sectors of the agri-food system towards delivering food security (Haddad et al 2016). This could include the following: refocusing agriculture upon nutrition by redirecting agricultural research away from a small number of cereals towards crops with higher nutritional value, such as pulses, vegetables and fruits; redefining agricultural metrics (Sukhdev et al 2016), for example in terms of people nourished per hectare rather than yield (Cassidy et al 2013); increasing the demand for production of healthy food by encouraging change in consumer practice; devising practical ways to incorporate externalities into the cost of food to take into account environmental impact; and extending our understanding of the link between diet and environment (Tilman and Clark 2014) with more high precision investigations of the environmental impact of particular food products, with sufficient granularity to reach firm conclusions and identify positive interventions (Horton et al 2016;Goucher et al 2017).…”

Section: Ethical Legal and Political Tensions In Agri-food Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

et al. 2017

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This paper outlines the development of an integrated interdisciplinary approach to agri-food research, designed to address the 'grand challenge' of global food security. Rather than meeting this challenge by working in separate domains or via single-disciplinary perspectives, we chart the development of a system-wide approach to the food supply chain. In this approach, social and environmental questions are simultaneously addressed. Firstly, we provide a holistic model of the agri-food system, which depicts the processes involved, the principal inputs and outputs, the actors and the external influences, emphasising the system's interactions, feedbacks and complexities. Secondly, we show how this model necessitates a research programme that includes the study of land-use, crop production and protection, food processing, storage and distribution, retailing and consumption, nutrition and public health. Acknowledging the methodological and epistemological challenges involved in developing this approach, we propose two specific ways forward. Firstly, we propose a method for analysing and modelling agri-food systems in their totality, which enables the complexity to be reduced to essential components of the whole system to allow tractable quantitative analysis using LCA and related methods. This initial analysis allows for more detailed quantification of total system resource efficiency, environmental impact and waste. Secondly, we propose a method to analyse the ethical, legal and political tensions that characterise such systems via the use of deliberative fora. We conclude by proposing an agenda for agri-food research which combines these two approaches into a rational programme for identifying, testing and implementing the new agri-technologies and agri-food policies, advocating the critical application of nexus thinking to meet the global food security challenge.

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Section: Environmental and Socio-economic Benefitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Quantitative Analysis and Modelling Of Agri-food Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethical Legal and Political Tensions In Agri-food Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

et al. 2017

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“…In the first, it was shown how nearly half of the greenhouse gas emissions from producing a loaf of bread arise from the nitrogen fertiliser used to drive wheat cultivation (Goucher et al 2017). With over 100 million tonnes of such fertiliser used annually to support global food production, and the other impacts that arise such as pollution of water courses, the unsustainability of modern agriculture is exposed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

We need radical change in how we produce and consume food

Horton

2017

Food Sec.

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“…A recent study [2] illustrates the large environmental impact of fertilizer in a wheat-to-bread supply chain. The use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer alone accounted for 43.4% of the overall Global Warming Potential (GWP) and 34.1% of the Eutrophication Potential (EP) in the production of a loaf of bread.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Stereovision-Based Technique to Measure the Spread Patterns of Granular Fertilizer Spreaders

Cool

Pieters

Seatovic

et al. 2017

Sensors

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Centrifugal fertilizer spreaders are by far the most commonly used granular fertilizer spreader type in Europe. Their spread pattern however is error-prone, potentially leading to an undesired distribution of particles in the field and losses out of the field, which is often caused by poor calibration of the spreader for the specific fertilizer used. Due to the large environmental impact of fertilizer use, it is important to optimize the spreading process and minimize these errors. Spreader calibrations can be performed by using collection trays to determine the (field) spread pattern, but this is very time-consuming and expensive for the farmer and hence not common practice. Therefore, we developed an innovative multi-camera system to predict the spread pattern in a fast and accurate way, independent of the spreader configuration. Using high-speed stereovision, ejection parameters of particles leaving the spreader vanes were determined relative to a coordinate system associated with the spreader. The landing positions and subsequent spread patterns were determined using a ballistic model incorporating the effect of tractor motion and wind. Experiments were conducted with a commercial spreader and showed a high repeatability. The results were transformed to one spatial dimension to enable comparison with transverse spread patterns determined in the field and showed similar results.

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The environmental impact of fertilizer embodied in a wheat-to-bread supply chain

Abstract: Food production and consumption cause approximately one third of total greenhouse

Cited by 88 publications

References 33 publications

An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

An agenda for integrated system-wide interdisciplinary agri-food research

We need radical change in how we produce and consume food

Development of a Stereovision-Based Technique to Measure the Spread Patterns of Granular Fertilizer Spreaders

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