Life cycle assessment at the farm level: method and first results

Abstract

With the new conscience of environment in the society, stakeholders are more and more interested in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool to evaluate environmental impacts of agro-food products. This multicriteria approach of a product, a service or a good takes place from "cradle to grave" with a four step normalized procedure. The goal of our study is to produce a method based on LCA principles to evaluate environmental impacts of a whole farm. The proposed method divides up the farm in three interrelated subsystems: the crop subsystem, the forage subsystem and the livestock subsystem. Data were collected on the Cemagref farm and completed with Ecoinvent data for the first two subsystems. Environmental impacts were assessed with CML2001 and EcoIndicator99 methods. We want to highlight the operations (fertilisation, crop protection, sowing, tillage, harvesting) having the worst impact on the environment regarding the studied categories (eutrophication, acidification, ecotoxicity, land use...). It appears that fertilisation has the worst impact on almost all the categories regarding the other operations while sowing has only an impact on land use. This study allows us to identify the most unfriendly operations regarding the environment and the main scientific questions to answer in order to conduct a LCA on a whole farm.