LCA applied to perennial cropping systems: a review focused on the farm stage

Perennial crops globally provide a lot of fruit and other food products. They may also provide feedstock for bioenergy and have been, notably to this end, the subject of several LCA-based studies mostly focusing on energy and GHG balances. The purpose of this review was to investigate the relevance of LCAs on perennial crops, especially focusing on how the perennial crop specificities were accounted for in the farm stage modelling.

In the vast majority of the reviewed papers, very little attention was paid on integrating the perennial cropping cycle in the LCA. It is especially true for bioenergy LCA-based studies that often mostly focused on the industrial transformation without detailing the agricultural raw material production, although it might contribute to a large extent to the studied impacts. Some key parameters, such as the length of the crop cycle, the immature and unproductive phase or the biannual yield alternance, were mostly not accounted for. Moreover, the lack of conceptual modelling of the perennial cycle was not balanced by any attempt to represent the temporal variability of the system with a comprehensive inventory of crop managements and field emissions over several years.

According to the reviewed papers and complementary references, we identified the gaps in current LCA of perennial cropping systems and proposed a road map for scientific researches to help fill-in the knowledge-based gaps. We also made some methodological recommendations in order to account better for the perennial cycle within LCA considering the aim of the study and data availability.