skip to main content


Title: Potential Environmental Impacts of Peanut Using Water Footprint Assessment: A Case Study in Georgia
The recent decade has witnessed an increase in irrigated acreage in the southeast United States due to the shift in cropping patterns, climatic conditions, and water availability. Peanut, a major legume crop cultivated in Georgia, Southeast United States, has been a staple food in the American household. Regardless of its significant contribution to the global production of peanuts (fourth largest), studies related to local or regional scale water consumption in peanut production and its significant environmental impacts are scarce. Therefore, the present research contributes to the water footprint of peanut crops in eight counties of Georgia and its potential ecological impacts. The impact categories relative to water consumption (water depletion—green and blue water scarcity) and pesticide use (water degradation—potential freshwater ecotoxicity) using crop-specific characterization factors are estimated for the period 2007 to 2017 at the mid-point level. These impacts are transformed into damages to the area of protection in terms of ecosystem quality at the end-point level. This is the first county-wise quantification of the water footprint and its impact assessment using ISO 14046 framework in the southeast United States. The results suggest inter-county differences in water consumption of crops with higher blue water requirements than green and grey water. According to the water footprint analysis of the peanut crop conducted in this study, additional irrigation is recommended in eight Georgia counties. The mid-point level impact assessment owing to water consumption and pesticide application reveals that the potential freshwater ecotoxicity impacts at the planting and growing stages are higher for chemicals with high characterization factors regardless of lower pesticide application rates. Multiple regression analysis indicates blue water, yield, precipitation, maximum surface temperature, and growing degree days are the potential factors influencing freshwater ecotoxicity impacts. Accordingly, a possible impact pathway of freshwater ecotoxicity connecting the inventory flows and the ecosystem quality is defined. This analysis is helpful in the comparative environmental impact assessments for other major crops in Georgia and aids in water resource management decisions. The results from the study could be of great relevance to the southeast United States, as well as other regions with similar climatic zones and land use patterns. The assessment of water use impacts relative to resource availability can assist farmers in determining the timing and layout of crop planting.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1735235
NSF-PAR ID:
10350847
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Agronomy
Volume:
12
Issue:
4
ISSN:
2073-4395
Page Range / eLocation ID:
930
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract

    Spatiotemporal patterns of crop nitrogen (N) budget have important implications for agricultural N management and environmental policy. Previous studies examined crop N budget in different countries but often overlooked cross‐crop differences at sub‐national scales. In this study, we synthesize multiple databases to examine the N budget of eight major crops in the United States at the county scale during 1970–2019. Our analyses show that national crop N use efficiency (NUE) increased from 0.55 kg N kg−1 N in the 1970s to 0.65 kg N kg−1 N in the 2010s. Four out of eight crops such as corn, rice, cotton, and sorghum demonstrated an increasing NUE trend during the study period, whereas the other crops overall presented a declining NUE trend. Nationwide, about 41% of the total N input was not used by these crops (i.e., N surplus) over the study period, of which temporal variation was mainly driven by corn due to its large planting area and high N input. The national N surplus first increased in the 1970s and remained relatively stable till the 2000s. Since the early 2010s, however, N surplus began to decline and approached the levels in the early 1970s—an encouraging development that may lead to decreased N pollution to the environment. The hotspots of national N surplus coincided with corn‐ and rice‐producing counties. The sub‐national variations and temporal dynamics in crop N budget revealed in this study highlight the urgent need to understand the farm‐level crop N balance and the dominant factors controlling crop NUE for mitigating N pollution.

     
    more » « less
  2. Michael Kaiser (Ed.)
    By influencing soil organic carbon (SOC), cover crops play a key role in shaping soil health and hence the system's long‐term sustainability. However, the magnitude by which cover crops impacts SOC depends on multiple factors, including soil type, climate, crop rotation, tillage type, cover crop growth, and years under management. To elucidate how these multiple factors influence the relative impact of cover crops on SOC, we conducted a meta‐analysis on the impacts of cover crops within rotations that included corn (Zea maysL.) on SOC accumulation. Information on climatic conditions, soil characteristics, management, and cover crop performance was extracted, resulting in 198 paired comparisons from 61 peer‐reviewed studies. Over the course of each study, cover crops on average increased SOC by 7.3% (95% CI, 4.9%–9.6%). Furthermore, the impact of cover crop–induced increases in percent change SOC was evaluated across soil textures, cover crop types, crop rotations, biomass amounts, cover crop durations, tillage practices, and climatic zones. Our results suggest that current cover crop–based corn production systems are sequestering 5.5 million Mg of SOC per year in the United States and have the potential to sequester 175 million Mg SOC per year globally. These findings can be used to improve carbon footprint calculations and develop science‐based policy recommendations. Taken altogether, cover cropping is a promising strategy to sequester atmospheric C and hence make corn production systems more resilient to changing climates.

     
    more » « less
  3. Abstract

    Water security is tightly connected with the food security, ecological health, and economic prosperity of a region. In this study, a comprehensive water security assessment based on water footprint concepts from 1995 to 2015 was performed for the counties located in the Contiguous States of the Unites States. The availability of blue water (e.g., surface water) is comparatively less in the western river basins, and most of the rainfed agricultural lands in the eastern United States were characterized by the lower levels of green water (e.g., root zone soil moisture) storage. This integrated assessment of the water security indicators can directly map the critical regions and reveal the dependence between human water consumption, crop water requirements and environmental flow. This analysis can be further extended to incorporate climate change and extreme drought events to inform specific locations (e.g., counties and watersheds) at which problems of water conflict are more likely to occur.

     
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    California’s Central Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. Its high-value fruit, vegetable, and nut crops rely on surface water imports from a vast network of reservoirs and canals as well as groundwater, which has been substantially overdrafted to support irrigation. The region has undergone a shift to perennial (tree and vine) crops in recent decades, which has increased water demand amid a series of severe droughts and emerging regulations on groundwater pumping. This study quantifies the expansion of perennial crops in the Tulare Lake Basin, the southern region of the Central Valley with limited natural water availability. A gridded crop type dataset is compiled on a 1 mi2spatial resolution from a historical database of pesticide permits over the period 1974–2016 and validated against aggregated county-level data. This spatial dataset is then analyzed by irrigation district, the primary spatial scale at which surface water supplies are determined, to identify trends in planting decisions and agricultural water demand over time. Perennial crop acreage has nearly tripled over this period, and currently accounts for roughly 60% of planted area and 80% of annual revenue. These trends show little relationship with water availability and have been driven primarily by market demand. From this data, we focus on the increasing minimum irrigation needs each year to sustain perennial crops. Results indicate that under a range of plausible future regulations on groundwater pumping ranging from 10% to 50%, water supplies may fail to consistently meet demands, increasing losses by up to 30% of annual revenues. More broadly, the datasets developed in this work will support the development of dynamic models of the integrated water-agriculture system under uncertain climate and regulatory changes to understand the combined impacts of water supply shortages and intensifying irrigation demand.

     
    more » « less
  5. Abstract

    Agriculture is the largest user of water in the United States. Yet, we do not understand the spatially resolved sources of irrigation water use (IWU) by crop. The goal of this study is to estimate crop‐specific IWU from surface water withdrawals (SWW), total groundwater withdrawals (GWW), and nonrenewable groundwater depletion (GWD). To do this, we employ the PCR‐GLOBWB 2 global hydrology model to partition irrigation information from the U.S. Geological Survey Water Use Database to specific crops across the Continental United States (CONUS). We incorporate high‐resolution input data on agricultural production and climate within the CONUS to obtain crop‐specific irrigation estimates for SWW, GWW, and GWD for 20 crops and crop groups from 2008 to 2020 at county spatial resolution. Over the study period, SWW decreased by 20%, while both GWW and GWD increased by 3%. On average, animal feed (alfalfa/hay) uses the most irrigation water across all water sources: 33 from SWW, 13 from GWW, and 10 km3/yr from GWD. Produce used less SWW (43%), but more GWW (57%), and GWD (27%) over the study time‐period. The largest changes in IWU for each water source between the years 2008 and 2020 are: rice (SWW decreased by 71%), sugar beets (GWW increased by 232%), and rapeseed (GWD increased by 405%). These results present the first national‐scale assessment of irrigation by crop, water source, and year. In total, we contribute nearly 2.5 million data points to the literature (3,142 counties; 13 years; 3 water sources; and 20 crops).

     
    more » « less