Energy optimization in wheat establishment following rice residue management with Happy Seeder technology for reduced carbon footprints in north-western India

Abstract

Rice residue management (RRM) impacts ecosystems’ sustainability due to change in energy use, C footprints (CFs) and net ecosystem C budget (NECB). The energy input-output and CFs were audited to optimize energy use and C equivalent emissions (CE) in wheat following RRM with Happy Seeder using data collected from 53 farmers during face-to-face interview. Average total energy input (EI) of 23.5 GJ ha−1 produced output energy of 204.8 ± 2.9 GJ ha−1, with energy productivity (EP) of 0.24 kg MJ−1. The net energy gain (NEG) of 181.3 ± 3.0 GJ ha−1 was achieved with energy use efficiency (ER) of 8.81 ± 0.19. Chemical fertilizers were the major hotspots of energy (∼48.4% of EI) and CFs (∼59.2% of CE) in wheat cultivation. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) elucidated 23 decision making units (∼43% of total) as energy efficient, whilst 30 as inefficient with average technical efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE) were 0.94, 0.97 and 0.94, respectively. DEA helped energy saving of 1462.8 MJ ha−1 (∼6.2%), mitigation of 107.8 kg CO2e ha−1 (∼7.6%) with significantly higher NECB of 716.4 kg C ha−1 (∼19.1%) due to change in soil organic C (ΔSOC) pool by 34.8 kg C ha−1 at efficient Happy Seeder sown wheat farms.