Team quantifies carbon footprint of peanuts from São Paulo rotated with pasture

Embrapa Meio Ambiente, in partnership with the productive sector of São Paulo, with Embrapa Algodão and with Apta Polo Regional Centro Norte, quantified the carbon footprint of peanuts rotated with pasture, in the state of São Paulo, with very competitive results in relation to international. This is yet another initiative, which adds to Embrapa Meio Ambiente's major undertaking, to quantify the carbon footprint of Brazilian agricultural products, such as soy, corn, sugar cane and coffee.

Peanut consumers, who until recently were mainly concerned with the safety of this food, have recently also become interested in the impacts of their production on the environment and climate change. In this sense, a partial result of a survey to determine the environmental profile and carbon footprint of São Paulo peanuts, which accounts for more than 90% of national production, according to data from Conab, was presented at the VII Brazilian Congress on Life Cycle Management. São Paulo also encompasses a diversity of systems for peanut production, which represent the way it is produced in the field. Peanuts in sugarcane reforming are the most common system, representing 85% of São Paulo's production, followed by the reforming/rotation system with pasture (12%) and the grain system (3%).

Peanut rotated with pasture is most commonly found in the Alta Paulista region and comprises two production cycles in the summer, followed by pasture cultivation. The result of the carbon footprint was 655 kg of CO2eq - equivalent in carbon dioxide, for every 1000 kg of peanut pods harvested, quantified by the LCA - Life Cycle Assessment methodology.

According to researcher Nilza Patrícia Ramos, from Embrapa Meio Ambiente, this value is 59% lower than the world average and 79% lower than that of Argentina, considering Ecoinvent, which is a highly regarded international LCA database. It is also 28% lower than the United States peanut footprint, estimated according to the WFLDB (World Food LCA Database).

The LCA methodology was selected to account for potential environmental impacts from the cradle to the farm gate (harvested product), explains researcher Marília Folegatti, also from Embrapa Meio Ambiente, and showed that 80 kg of CO2eq for every 1000 kg of peanuts in harvested pods come from upstream processes (or background – processes from the industrial phase of production of agricultural inputs and earlier); 162 kg of CO2eq comes from the field production stage itself; and 413 kg of CO2eq come from emissions resulting from changes in land use (MUT), which consider the dynamics of land use in the state over the last 20 years.

Marília also highlights that this importance of MUT emissions occurs due to the fact that Brazil is a country with an agricultural frontier that is still expanding, in relation to other countries, and that this affects other agricultural crops, not just peanuts.

The information used in the study corresponds to primary data, surveys with experts and consultations with technical-scientific literature. According to Anna Letícia Pighinelli, an analyst at Embrapa Meio Ambiente, the use of primary data, validated by experts and compared with the literature, guarantees greater representativeness of the study. She also cites as an innovation the consideration of culture in the production system, with sharing of impacts related to the consumption of inputs and agricultural operations, which are used by all crops in the system, such as soil preparation and the application of correctives.

In the case of peanuts in a pasture system, this sharing resulted in a 14,8% reduction in carbon emissions for peanuts. This means that if peanuts were grown in a single system, using the same practices as in this study, their carbon footprint could be 769 kg of CO2eq for every 1000 kg of peanuts in pods.

This result, together with the carbon footprint of peanuts grown in a sugarcane reforming system, will represent the carbon footprint of typical peanuts, produced in the state of São Paulo. The work team hopes, in the near future, to deposit these results in reputable LCA databases, allowing the peanut production sector, and also its consumers, to enjoy representative and competitive carbon footprint values ​​for their products.

The authors of the study are Nilza Patrícia Ramos, Anna Letícia Pighinelli (Embrapa Meio Ambiente), Dartanhã Soares (Embrapa Algodão), Vinícius Gonçalves Maciel Innovation Fellow, Marcos Doniseti Michelott (Apta Regional Centro Norte) and Marília Folegatti (Embrapa Meio Ambiente).