Mapping agriculture's impact by combining farm management handbooks, life-cycle assessment and search engine science

Abstract

Despite great advancements in recent years, the availability of detailed and regionalised farm practice data at national scale remains an obstacle for spatially-detailed research on sustainable intensification. Parsing and information retrieval techniques were applied to 385 farm management handbooks to estimate farm practices (use of fertilisers, pesticides, water, fuel) of 72 commodities grown in 42 regions. Life-cycle inventories were used to derive GHG emissions and energy use from farm practice data. Practices and impacts were mapped at 1.1 km2 resolution using agricultural census data and a remote-sensing-based land use map. Existing data was linearly extrapolated using a rule-based approach to fill spatial gaps. Estimates were, in aggregate, comparable to the best available data at national and local scales. Our method contributes to the push to create more spatially-detailed assessments of agricultural impacts at a national scale by focusing on the production of basic data at the farm level.