Life Cycle Assessment of Organic Canadian Prairie Field Crop Systems: Oats, Rye, and Wheat

Abstract

Organic farming is a rapidly growing agricultural sub-sector in Canada that many look to as a means to lower resource use and environmental impacts of food systems. In this thesis, life cycle assessment (LCA) is coupled with modelling of changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) to quantify impact contributions from Western Canadian organic wheat, rye and oats production to a range of global scale challenges including climate change. Primary data were collected using a survey sent to organic field crop producers across Canada. Options for modelling SOC flux were examined through a literature review. Results indicate that net climate change impacts, on a production weighted average basis, were 79.6 kg CO2 eq tonne-1 of wheat, 134 kg CO2 eq for oats, and 116 kg CO2 eq for rye. Notably, some individual organic farms were sequestering SOC, but this was not enough to make any of the farms net negative.