Carbon footprint and energetic analysis of tomato production in the organic vs the conventional cropping systems in Southern Italy

Domenico Ronga,Tommaso Gallingani,Massimo Zaccardelli,Domenico Perrone,Enrico Francia,Justyna Milc,Nicola Pecchioni

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.02.111

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture aims to reduce its environmental impact. In this research, the carbon footprint and energetic analysis have been performed for three consecutive years to investigate the actual environmental impact of processing tomato production, in the organic (OS) vs the conventional cropping systems (CS), in a specialized Mediterranean area in Southern Italy. The global warming potential (GWP, in term of kg CO2-eq) and primary energy demand (PED, in term of MJ) of processing tomato produced in the two systems (average of three years) were compared in this study. Our results indicate that GWP was on average + 22% in the OS than in CS using 1 ton of marketable fresh fruits as FU. On the other hand, GWP recorded in the OS was, on average, −40% compared to the CS, if 1 ha was considered. A similar impact was registered for PED. The OS showed +28% vs −38% of PED than the CS, using 1 t of marketable fresh fruit vs 1 ha. Pesticide and fungicide applications and soil tillage had the highest impacts among management inputs on GWP and PED, for both farming systems. Hence, the environmental efficiency of these practices could be largely improved in the production of processing tomato aiming at sustainable farming. In conclusion, the differences of sustainability observed between the two farming systems were mainly due to the far lower marketable yield recorded in the OS vs the CS. Therefore, the priority future challenge of organic processing tomato farming should be the reduction of the yield gap between the OS and the CS, through the development of both new genotypes and innovative management methods, designed to reduce the gap, but not increasing the environmental impact on the agroecosystem.

Highlights

The search for food security, after the growing concerns about the increase of world population and its impact on climate change, in most cases is not considering the problem of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions
Other authors showed the capability of the organic cropping system (OS) to reduce the carbon footprint of the agroecosystem (Dalgaard et al, 2001; Haas et al 2001; Meisterling et al, 2009; Refsgaard et al, 1998; Tuomisto et al, 2012a; Tuomisto et al, 2012b), our study is the first performed on processing tomato collecting real data in the open field, through three years of field experiment, in two farms located in the same geographic area, with similar soil characteristics, weather conditions and cropping the same cultivars
Pesticide and fungicide applications had the highest impact both on global warming potential (GWP) and primary energy demand (PED) in the OS and the same was for soil tillage in the Results reported by Brodt et al (2013) indicate that California-produced conventional and organic tomato paste, and canned diced tomatoes are almost equivalent in term of energy use and GHGs emissions, recording yield of 90 t ha-1 and 85 t ha-1 in the cropping systems (CS) and OS, respectively

Summary

Introduction

The search for food security, after the growing concerns about the increase of world population and its impact on climate change, in most cases is not considering the problem of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. One of the most impelling challenges for agriculture is how to improve the food yield without increasing the GHGs. Agriculture is one of the economic sectors contributing to the production of GHGs emissions (IPCC, 2014): one of the priorities in the international agricultural policy agenda is to guarantee the growth of crop yield while limiting its carbon footprint (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012). Since chemical products are not allowed in the organic cropping system (OS), this could be an alternative and more sustainable method for the production of the crops (Bender and van der Heijden, 2015), contributing to the reduction of GHGs (Scialabba and Hattam, 2002). An interesting study based on a metaanalysis of 343 peer-reviewed publications showed that the organic crops, compared to the non-organic ones have on average higher concentrations of antioxidant compounds, lower concentrations of cadmium and lower incidence of pesticide residues in their edible organs (Barański et al, 2014)

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