CAN ORGANIC FARMING HELP TO REDUCE NATIONAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND EMISSIONS OF GREENHOUSE GASSES IN DENMARK? - Economics of Sustainable Energy in Agriculture - page 189

result in higher future prices on organic products the overall costs for the
society would be lower.
In the 1996-situation, there is a potential to double the production
of bio-energy in the form of straw and biogas (Dalgaard et al. 2000). This
potential is not as large in the organic scenarios, where straw production is
lower, and more straw is needed for the deep bedding stables, required for
animal welfare reasons. If the conventional biomass potential was fully
utilised, another J bioenergy could be produced. If this energy
was deducted from the 1996 energy use no energy would be saved by
conversion to 100% organic farming. Furthermore, there was an export of
kg grain in the 1996-situation. If these cereals were burned in
power plants for heat and electricity, a gross energy production of about
J may be achieved. In this situation, the conventional farming of
1996 has a more positive energy balance than any of the scenarios for
conversion to organic farming. However, there are many unanswered
questions concerning the possibilities for combined food energy systems
(Kuemmel et al. 1998), which may change the conclusions of this chapter.
Further investigations within this area are therefore recommended.
The comparison of simulated energy use with official statistics
showed a good prediction of the 1996-situation. The calculated CFs from
1996 were therefore also used to correct the simulation results in the
organic scenarios. This linear scaling procedure was the best procedure
within the limits of the present work, but future work can possibly improve
the methods for upscaling and the possibility to test simulated, national
scale results considerably. One reason why the 'true' CF for the organic
scenarios might differ from the 1996-CF is the different field size
distribution on the organic farms. This becomes important because the
known non-linear relation between field size and energy use (Nielsen and
Sørensen 1994) is not included in Dalgaard et al. 's (2001) model. Another
reason is that the marked for organic products is effected by the scale to
which the conversion happens. Conversion of one farm will not effect the
marked but a 100% conversion of the whole country will, as discussed
above, change both the prices of agricultural products and the demand for
fodder and energy dramatically (Jacobsen and Frandsen 1999). To assess
such scale effects, simple aritmethic aggregation might not be sufficient.
Consequently, new procedures to scale up farm level information on
energy use and emissions of greenhouse gases to the regional and national
level are needed.
In this study, the default IPCC (1997) methodology for calculation
of methane and nitrous oxide emissions is applied to scenarios where the
Danish agricultural production was described in highly aggregated
livestock and crop type groups. However, the calculated emissions in the