LCA of Applying a Smart Farming System – Implementing a Territorial Approach for Recommending Good Agricultural Practices

This study is part of the LIFE GAIA Sense project, aiming to evaluate the environmental efficiency of Smart Farming (SF) through LCA and to produce recommendations for good agricultural practices. Thus, the environmental performance of SF treatment, specifically regarding fertilizers/pesticides application and irrigation, is compared to that of conventional agricultural management, under similar soil and climatic field conditions. According to the goal and scope of the study, a cradle-to-field gate approach was selected, while the inventory was built with data recorded in crop logbooks and questionnaires distributed to farmers, containing details about field activities. The impact analysis results reveal the environmental benefit of the SF-based management approach in relation to resource use, ecosystem and human health protection, in most of the field cases examined. Based on single score calculations with the ReCiPe 2016 (H) impact method, the results strongly suggest fossil and mineral resource scarcity as the most essential impacts to be considered, mainly decreased for the SF fields. Moreover, a territorial approach for introducing regionalization in the application of LCA on agricultural systems is conducted. Finally, good practice recommendations are suggested to facilitate decision making, considering foreground and background system processes.