Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
CAN ORGANIC FARMING HELP TO REDUCE
NATIONAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND
EMISSIONS OF GREENHOUSE GASSES IN
DENMARK?
Tommy Dalgaard, Niels Halberg and Jes Fenger
1. INTRODUCTION
Methods to investigate whether organic farming might help to reduce
energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are needed. The aim of
this study is for the first to present an upscaling procedure, where an
existing farm level energy consumption model, in combination with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's guidelines, is used to
calculate agricultural energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
on the national level. Secondly, this procedure is used to simulate scenarios
for conversion to organic farming in Denmark.
Three scenarios for conversion to organic farming with the present
crop yield and an expected improved future crop yield are compared to the
1996-situation in Denmark, where conventional farming dominates. In all
scenarios, fossil energy use and emissions of the three major agricultural
greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are reduced.
The first aim of this chapter is to present an upscaling procedure,
where an existing farm level model for energy use (Dalgaard
et al
. 2001),
in combination with existing methods to calculate agricultural emissions of
greenhouse gasses (IPCC 2000), is used to calculate national level energy
consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The second aim is to use this
procedure to simulate three scenarios for conversion to 100% organic
farming in Denmark and by comparison to the 1996 situation to answer the
question 'Can organic farming help to reduce national energy consumption
and emissions of greenhouse gasses in Denmark?'
There are three main reasons to limit the use of fossil energy. First,
fossil energy is a limited resource which, as far as possible, should be
conserved for the coming generations (Brown
et al.
1998). Second,
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