National Grains Life Cycle Assessment project

Background

NSW DPI, in collaboration with CSIRO and Lifecycles Pty Ltd, were funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to benchmark the environmental impacts of producing key grain crops throughout Australia, and to assess the potential for management changes to wheat production to provide climate mitigation.

Project outputs provide information for growers, agronomists and policy makers to understand the impacts of production, the source of impacts and how management change may minimise the emissions of greenhouse gases from the systems.

The project assessed the impacts of producing the two key cereal/oilseed crops and key legume crop for each GRDC agro-ecological zone (AEZ) and modelled against specific mitigation strategies.

Table 1: Primary cereal/oilseed crops and primary legumes for each agro-ecological zone (AEZ)

Data sources

Many data sources were used to assess the impacts of crop production. Face-to-face interviews were held with regional experts such as agronomists, consultants and researchers in each AEZ. They provided data such as crop yields, rate and timing of farm chemical applications, rate and frequency of soil amendments, and fertiliser inputs. Other data sources used were statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and publically available research databases. Data from all sources were compared and data selected to assess the impacts of crop production for “common practice” throughout the zone.