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Cup plant, an alternative to conventional silage from a LCA perspective

  • LCA FOR AGRICULTURE
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Abstract

Purpose

The growing awareness of the importance of biodiversity in agroecosystems in increasing and ensuring the supply of biomass has led to heightened interest from governments and farmers in alternative crops. This article assesses one such alternative crop, cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum L.), in terms of the environmental aspects of cultivation for forage production. Many studies have previously focused on cup plant, but so far, this plant has not been assessed using the life cycle assessment (LCA) method.

Materials and methods

This study compares the environmental load of cup plant with the most commonly grown silage crops in Central European conditions—maize—and with another common forage crop—lucerne using LCA. The system boundaries include all the processes from cradle to farm gate and both mass-based (1 ton of dry matter) and area-based (1 ha of monoculture) functional units were chosen for the purposes of this study. The results cover the impact categories related to the agricultural LCAs, and the ReCiPe Midpoint (H) characterization model was used for the data expression, by using SimaPro 9.0.0.40 software.

Results

This study compares the cultivation of cup plant with the most commonly grown silage crop in Central European conditions—maize—and with another common forage crop—lucerne. The paper shows the potential of cup plant to replace conventional silage (maize and lucerne silage mix) with certain environmental savings in selected impact categories, and importantly, while still maintaining the same performance levels in dairy farming as with conventional silage, as already reported in previous publications. For the Czech Republic alone, this would, in practice, mean replacing up to 50,000 ha of silage maize and reducing the environmental load by about tens of percent or more within the various impact categories and years of cultivation.

Conclusion

Cup plant can replace the yield and quality of silage maize, represents a lower environmental load per unit of production and unit of area and generally carries many other benefits. Thus, cup plant is a recommendable option for dairy farming. Given the recent experience and knowledge of the issue, the cup plant can be considered an effective alternative to conventional silage.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Christopher Steer (University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice-Faculty of Science, Language Department) for his proofreading of the paper and to Pedro Gerstberger (University of Bayreuth, Department of Plant Ecology, Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany) for the material support. We finally want to warmly thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which improved the quality of the paper.

Funding

The research was financially supported by the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (project No. GAJU 045/2019/Z).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Agriculture, University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

    Jaroslav Bernas, Tereza Bernasová, Jan Moudrý, Petr Konvalina & Jan Moudrý Jr.

  2. Department of Plant Ecology, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany

    Pedro Gerstberger

Authors
  1. Jaroslav Bernas
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  2. Tereza Bernasová
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  3. Pedro Gerstberger
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  4. Jan Moudrý
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  5. Petr Konvalina
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  6. Jan Moudrý Jr.
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Contributions

Jaroslav Bernas: conceptualization, data collection, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, visualization, supervision; Tereza Bernasová: writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, visualization, investigation; Pedro Gerstberger: material support; Jan Moudrý: material support; Petr Konvalina: supervision; Jan. Moudrý Jr.: supervision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaroslav Bernas.

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Communicated by Thomas Jan Nemecek.

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Bernas, J., Bernasová, T., Gerstberger, P. et al. Cup plant, an alternative to conventional silage from a LCA perspective. Int J Life Cycle Assess 26, 311–326 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-020-01858-x

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