Life cycle assessment data of French organic agricultural products

International audienceEnvironmental data on organic products are needed to assess their environmental performance. The purpose of the ACV Bio project reported here was to generate environmental data as life cycle assessment (LCA) data for a sample of French organic production systems including cropping systems (annual crops, intercrops, forages), grassland, wine grapes, cow milk, calves, beef cattle, sheep, pigs, broilers and eggs. LCA was used to estimate environmental impacts of products from these systems. Recommended uses are to characterize part of the diversity of French organic farming systems and some of their environmental impacts, identify areas for improvement, perform eco-design and sensitivity analysis, and/or make system choices in a given context. However, these data do not represent average French organic products and should not be used as such. The MEANS-InOut web application was used to generate life cycle inventories (LCI). Impact assessment was performed using SimaPro v9 software. The Environmental Footprint 2.0 characterisation method was used to generate LCA data. These data were supplemented with three LCA indicators: cumulative energy demand, land competition (CML-IA non-baseline) and biodiversity loss. Three non-LCA indicators were also calculated for certain systems: diversity of crop families (for cropping systems), agro-ecological in- frastructure (for sheep) and pesticide treatment frequency index (for grapes). In total, 173 products were modelled. LCA and non-LCA data are available in the Microsoft (R) Excel file at Data INRAE (https://doi.org/10.15454/TTR25S). LCI data are available in the AGRIBALYSE database and can be accessed using SimaPro and openLCA software. Farmer-practice data are available on demand

Using Life Cycle Assessment To Assess And Improve The Environmental Performance Of Organic Production Systems

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an international method that allows an estimation of a set of environmental impacts of products. A growing number of studies have used LCA to assess environmental impacts of agricultural products, but available LCA data mainly concern conventional agriculture. The ACV-Bio project has created LCA data for arable crops, grassland, forages, grapes, cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry in France. For most products, contrasting production systems were assessed to explore a diversity of organic systems. The web-based MEANS-InOut software was used to facilitate and streamline the generation of LCA data, and their external review by independent experts. Impact values were calculated for nine indicators. The InOut software was enhanced to allow assessment of intercrops and cropping systems, which are important elements of organic systems and of agro-ecological systems in general. Eco-design scenarios of pig and grape production systems allowed impact reductions of 0 - 22%, depending on the impact considered