Romaneckas, K.; Švereikaitė, A.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A.; Balandaitė, J. The Energy and Environmental Evaluation of Maize, Hemp and Faba Bean Multi-Crops. Agronomy2023, 13, 2316.
Romaneckas, K.; Švereikaitė, A.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A.; Balandaitė, J. The Energy and Environmental Evaluation of Maize, Hemp and Faba Bean Multi-Crops. Agronomy 2023, 13, 2316.
Romaneckas, K.; Švereikaitė, A.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A.; Balandaitė, J. The Energy and Environmental Evaluation of Maize, Hemp and Faba Bean Multi-Crops. Agronomy2023, 13, 2316.
Romaneckas, K.; Švereikaitė, A.; Kimbirauskienė, R.; Sinkevičienė, A.; Balandaitė, J. The Energy and Environmental Evaluation of Maize, Hemp and Faba Bean Multi-Crops. Agronomy 2023, 13, 2316.
Abstract
Agriculture uses a lot of fuel, fertilizers, pesticides and other substances, while emitting large amounts of GHGs. It is important to optimize these inputs and outputs. One such way is increas-ing crop biodiversity. For this reason, single crops and mixtures of maize, hemp and faba bean as binary and ternary crops were investigated at the Experimental Station of Vytautas Magnus Uni-versity, Lithuania.
Results showed that consumption of diesel fuel was by the 31-46% higher than in single and 22-35% higher than in binary cultivations was found in a ternary crop. This influenced on the highest energy input or near twice higher than in maize and hemp single crops and maize+hemp binary crop, but similar with binary crops with faba bean. Despite this, the productivity of the trinary crop and, at the same time, the energy output were 2-5 times higher than in other treat-ments. This compensated for higher energy inputs and the energy efficiency ratio. In ternary crop, energy productivity was from 1.1 to 2.8 times higher and net energy was by 1.9-5.3 times higher than in other tested cultivations. The highest total GHG emissions were obtained in binary maize+hemp and maize+faba bean cultivations (1729.84 and 2067.33 CO2eq ha-1). Ternary cultiva-tion with the highest energy inputs initiated average GHG emission - 1541.90 kg ha-1 CO2eq.
For higher efficiency, ternary crop could be sown and harvested in one machine pass. Faba beans should be included in the ter-nary crops, as their biomass takes a significant part of the total biomass produced. We recommend to review the inter-cropped faba bean seeding rates as faba bean seeds have a high energy input equivalent.
Keywords
Zea mays L.; Cannabis sativa L.; Vicia faba L.; multi-cultivations; energy indices; CO2 eq
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Sustainable Science and Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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