Background: Climate change is a pressing environmental and social challenge that demands effective monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One widely adopted approach for this is quantifying the carbon footprint (CF). Given that agriculture is a major contributor to GHG emissions, we have developed a comprehensive framework for CF accounting at the farm level. This framework has been tested on 12 farms in the Czech Republic to assess both data availability and calculation accuracy.
Results: Our study examines how various farm characteristics, such as turnover, land area and number of employees, influence the overall CF and enable meaningful comparisons between farms. We found that absolute farm CFs are significantly influenced by the size effect, making them unsuitable for benchmarking purposes. By contrast, relative farm CFs (per turnover, per area and per employee) are not affected by the size effect, but can be affected by a scale effect. Additionally, we investigated whether a focus on animal husbandry leads to higher relative CFs. By calculating the share of animal husbandry (SoAH) in farm operations, we discovered a significant correlation between SoAH and relative CFs, with the strongest correlation observed for CF per turnover (0.87).
期刊介绍:
The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture publishes peer-reviewed original research, reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives and spotlights in these areas, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary studies at the agriculture/ food interface.
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