Co-benefits of intercropping as a sustainable farming method for safeguarding both food security and air quality

Abstract

Large-scale, industrialized farming has contributed significantly to the increased global food supply to feed the fast-growing world population over the past few decades, but it also comes with severe threats to the environment. In particular, the excessive application of chemical fertilizer has led to large emissions of reactive nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere, where they become significant components of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution. Intercropping has been considered as a sustainable agricultural practice that can reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture, but its potential benefits beyond the farm scale have rarely been examined. Here we develop a new parameterization scheme for belowground mutualistic interactions between intercropped crops in the DeNitificaiton-DeComposition biogeochemical model, which is then used to simulate and quantify the benefits of nationwide adoption of maize–soybean systems in China in terms of gains in crop production, decreases in fertilizer consumption, and reductions in ammonia (NH3) emission. We further examine how such a decline in NH3 emission could lessen the downwind formation of PM2.5 using the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model. We show that annual mean inorganic PM2.5 concentrations can be reduced by up to 1.5 μg m–3 with the nationwide adoption of maize–soybean intercropping, with a corresponding annual net economic benefit of US$67 billion, of which US$13 billion arises from saved health costs from reduced air pollution. This study demonstrates the economic and environmental values of intercropping systems in dually promoting food security and environmental health, which can serve as a basis for policy consideration as governments and stakeholders explore more sustainable farming options.