Energy-efficient, sustainable crop production practices benefit smallholder farmers and the environment across three countries in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, South Asia

In the Eastern Gangetic Plains of South Asia current agronomic practices are energy-intensive, and this contributes to higher cropping system production costs and CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. Increasingly uncertain and scarce resources, together with an increasingly variable and changing climate, make conventional crop production vulnerable and unsustainable. We hypothesized that replacing traditional crop management with conservation agriculture based-sustainable intensification practices would reduce energy requirements and CO2-equivalent emissions while increasing energy use efficiency. Across three major cropping systems (rice-wheat, rice-maize and rice-lentil) we tested improved management practices against a conventional baseline on over 400 on-farm trials. Improved management practices significantly reduced the total energy used in rice-wheat cropping systems, from 30,045 MJ ha−1 under traditional baseline practice to around 26,500 MJ…