Dear Drlatief Ahmad, it is an interesting issue.
The agriculture sector contributes significantly to global carbon emissions from diverse sources such as product and machinery manufacture, transport of materials and direct and indirect soil greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists defined carbon foot print as a measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide and methane emissions of a defined population, system or activity, considering all relevant sources, sinks and storage within the spatial and temporal boundary of the population, system or activity of interest. Calculated as carbon dioxide equivalent using the relevant 100-year global warming potential (GWP100).
I have found an interesting article on related to this issue and please go through it.
certain agricultural society gives details of the carbon footprint of nitrogen fertilizers, which are necessary for farmers to make the right environmental decisions in order to minimize the impact of agricultural activity.
I would add: the machines (fieldworks) are also counted in the calculation.
here you can find a easy-to-understand document:
http://www.wamis.org/agm/meetings/teco14/S5-Desjardins.pdf
and here you can find an article:
Article Carbon footprint of China's crop production—An estimation us...
The energy crops is the area the carbon footprinting matters the most. It is extremely important to calculate the CO2 savings by using bioenergy from a given feedstock to compare alternatives, otherwise, we can fool ourselves. For example, bioethanol made of corn reduces the CO2 emission by 20% compared to gasoline. In the case of a second generation, woody biomass based bioethanol the reduction can be 80%.
The unit of operation can be 100 miles of transportation since you need more ethanol than gasoline to travel the same distance.
I calculated CO2 footprint of pellet and torrefied pellet from woody feedstock produced in NC, then exported to the EU. The unit of operation was the energy delivered (one MJ) since the energy density of torrefied pellet and pellet are different, also the emissions during the production differs :
Article Use of Linear Programming to Optimize the Social, Environmen...
Conference Paper COMPARE WOODY FEEDSTOCKS FOR BIOENERGY PRODUCTION FROM SOCIA...
Some papers from my former colleague Jesse Daystar:
Article Environmental life cycle impacts of cellulosic ethanol in th...
Chapter Introduction to Life-Cycle Assessment and Decision Making Ap...
Article Multi-attribute uncertainty analysis of the life cycle of li...
If you read environmental impacts across the supply chain, it is pretty much equivalent of the LCA only the methodology has more freedom.
In simple terms, the ecological burden caused by agricultural activity.
For carbon foot printing get first a complete inventory of all the activities for the crop or cropping system. Then assign an energy value to each one. Then rank each one from biggest to least and calculate a percentage of total. This foot print can be in carbon dioxide or carbon values. Where you have the highest foot prints these are the areas to work if foot prints can be lowered with results not suffering. The value of carbon sequestration in the soil minus the inventory of emission or foot print value can be used to get net sequestration which can be positive zero or negative. Greatest net sequestration will occur which soil sequestration is optimized and the carbon footprint of practices minimized. Like an economic analysis you can work on both increasing soil sequestration and reducing carbon footprint. Keeping running totals can give an idea of how you are doing.
Dear Drlatief Ahmad, it is an interesting issue.
The agriculture sector contributes significantly to global carbon emissions from diverse sources such as product and machinery manufacture, transport of materials and direct and indirect soil greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists defined carbon foot print as a measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide and methane emissions of a defined population, system or activity, considering all relevant sources, sinks and storage within the spatial and temporal boundary of the population, system or activity of interest. Calculated as carbon dioxide equivalent using the relevant 100-year global warming potential (GWP100).
I have found an interesting article on related to this issue and please go through it.
The amount of Carbon dioxide produced due to agricultural activities.
It refers to the total amount of carbon dioxide and green house gases an individual or organization is responsible.
The attached resources are helpful.
I agree with Dr. Hepperly and brother Dickson; however, these article may also be helpful:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=carbon+footprinting+in+agriculture&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHzMeo9NnZAhUJOsAKHQWCAVMQgQMIIzAA
my latest publication on complete calculations of carbon foot printing of grain production systems
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321311192_Large-scale_farming_operations_are_win
win_for_grain_production_soil_carbon_storage_and_mitigation_of_greenhouse_gases
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