Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems

Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1569398

Comparative life cycle assessment of perennial and annual crop production: Impact of farming systems and management practices

Provisionally accepted
  • 1ISARA Lyon, Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France
  • 2Iowa State University, Ames, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background and Objectives: The Intermediate Wheatgrass (IWG) Thinopyrum intermedium (Host) Barkworth & D.R. Dewey, marketed under the trade name Kernza® has been tested in France with a group of farmers since 2017. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a recognized methodology to assess the potential environmental impacts and resources consumption associated with a production system. An attributional LCA following ISO 14040/44 was conducted, focusing on static comparisons. The main purpose of this paper was to estimate the "cradle-to-farm gate" environmental effects caused by the cultivation of intermediate wheatgrassin comparison with the main crops produced, among which soft wheat and maize grain stand out. This research has been achieved with 6 farmers, 3 under organic and 3 under conventional production. A comparative assessment was carried out per year and under 3 years of crop rotation to determine contributions to the environmental impact. Several impact categories were evaluated, including global warming potential (GWP), ozone depletion (OD), freshwater eutrophication (FE) freshwater ecotoxicity (FEC) and acidification (AC).Major Findings: intermediate wheatgrass (IWG) shows significantly better environmental performance per hectare than annual crops due to its perennial nature with limited soil preparation and lower input requirements. Conversely, IWG performs worse per tonne due to its relatively low grain yield.IWG results shows higher contribution of mechanical practices than cash crops with 70% for GWP and OD and 20% with FE, AC and FEC due to low use of fertilizers and pesticides over the 3yr.Grain yields of organically grown crops are lower than those of conventionally grown crops, regardless of the crop. Conventional management shows higher environmental impacts than organic per hectare on IWG but also on annual crops in each category. Conversely organic management on IWG conduct to higher GWP and FE per volume due to regular mechanic weeding, inducing fuel consumption, and organic manure applied before sowing. The results on IWG show significant difference on environmental performance per hectare and per tonne between establishment year inducing soil preparation, sowing and fertilization and succeeding years with limited practices except weed management and/or mulching.

Keywords: Intermediate Wheatgrass1, Kernza®2, life cycle assessment3, Farming systems4, On-Farm5, Organic6, Conventionnal7

Received: 31 Jan 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 DAVID, Amaro, ROSENTRATER and Ghnimi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
CHRISTOPHE DAVID, ISARA Lyon, Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France
Kurt A. ROSENTRATER, Iowa State University, Ames, United States

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.