ABSTRACT
To meet future food, ber, and energy requirements, it is anticipated that agricultural yields will need to be doubled by 2050. Meeting this goal is complicated by increasing cost and availability of fertilizers, anticipated shortages in critical resources (land, P fertilizer, and liquid fuels), and urbanization that is reducing arable lands. Doubling food production with diminishing resources will require wide-scale investments in production agriculture, the development of new genomics that increase energy and production efciency, and the adoption of precision management techniques that increase productivity as well as resource use efciency. This chapter provides a framework for assessing energy efciency and an example using the readily available life-cycle assessment (LCA) model, biofuel energy simulator (BESS), to calculate energy returns at two landscape positions.
