Abstract
Increasing global food demand and economic growth result in increasing competition over scarce freshwater resources, worsened by climate change and pollution. The agricultural sector has the largest share in the water footprint of humanity. While most studies focus on estimating water footprints (WFs) of crops through modeling, there are only few experimental field studies. The current work aims to understand the effect of supposedly better agricultural practices, particularly precision agriculture (variable rate application of fertilizers and pesticides) and conservation agriculture (minimum, strip, or no-tillage), on water deterioration and water pollution. We analyzed the results from an experimental field study in the northeast of Italy, in which four different crops are grown across three years of crops rotation. We compared minimum, strip, and no-tillage systems undergoing variable to uniform rate application. Grey WFs are assessed based on a field dataset using yield maps data, soil texture, and crop operations field. Leaching and associated grey WFs are assessed based on application rates and various environmental factors. Yields are measured in the field and recorded in a precision map. The results illustrate how precision agriculture combined with soil conservation tillage systems can reduce the grey water footprint by the 10%. We assessed the grey Water Footprint for all the field operation processes during the three-year crop rotation.
Highlights
Water degradation becomes an important problem when the territory is affected by a high risk of water scarcity and water pollution
The main outcomes show an of yield variation from uniform rate application (URA) to the variable rate application (VRA), where, generally, the conservation soil practices benefit from a greater yield under VRA
In the case of Minimum Tillage (MT), the production is reduced within the use of precision agriculture, where only 2% yield reduction is recorded from URA to VRA
Summary
Water degradation becomes an important problem when the territory is affected by a high risk of water scarcity and water pollution. The variable nitrogen application can minimize differences in soil fertility between conservation tillage systems; especially, when the soil water storage is reduced and the fertilization is applied, there is a higher crop growth [10,11]. In this sense, precision farming is a technique able to indirectly minimize the water pollution because it improves the efficiency of agricultural processes without compromising the yield [12]. Many research studies demonstrate how conventional tillage could increase soil degradation [26,30,31], it contributes to soil organic matter reduction and to the loss of fertility [32]
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