Environmental Impact Assessment of Farming with Combined Methods of Life Cycle Assessment and Farm Carbon Calculator

Abstract

Nowadays, farming is one of the major sources of environmental impacts in the world. This research developed an approach of combining the life cycle assessment (LCA) and Farm Carbon Calculator (FCC) to assess the environmental impact of farming. The LCA is a general method covering a broad spectrum of environmental impact assessment and the FCC is a farming specific method focusing on carbon emission and sequestration. The approach is applied in an organic vegetable farm as an application scenario. In this chapter, the scope of the investigation is presented first, followed by assessing the environmental impact of farming by utilizing the LCA and FCC methods respectively. The assessments were conducted regarding key aspects of farming, including fuel/energy consumption, fertility improvement, materials, distribution, and waste/disposals. According to the assessment results, suggestions for reducing the environmental impact of farming are proposed. The outcome of the investigation proved the correctness and the compensative advantages of the approach.