Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12.5
. Components of Global Warming Impact (GWI, A) and the net impact (B) for
agricultural and successional ecosystems in the MCSE, if harvested for cellulosic biofuel
feedstock production. Error bars represent standard error (n = 6). Conventional and No-till
are in a corn-soybean-wheat rotation. Redrawn from Gelfand et al. (2013).
food crops that must then be grown elsewhere on land not otherwise in agricultural
production—what C markets call leakage. To avoid leakage, biofuel crops could be
grown on marginal land, that is, land not now used for food crops or grazing. This
could also avoid the ethical issue of food vs. fuel when feedstocks are grown on
arable cropland.
Perennial grasses are particularly well suited for such marginal lands—after
establishment, they require no agronomic attention other than harvest and per-
haps low rates of fertilization, and thus should have few environmental liabilities.
