Energy Use Pattern and GHG Emission for Barley Production in Mazandaran Province

Barley is one of the most important staple foods in the world and modern Barley productions heavily depend on fossil and other energy resources. This study thereforefocuses on estimating energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in Barley production in Mazandaran province of Iran. For this purpose, the data on 85 Barley production farms in four cities of Mazandaran province (Sari, Behshahr, Babol and Neka)were collected and analyzed. The results indicated that total input energy of 42998.44 MJha-1 was consumed for Barley production. Electricity and total chemical fertilizers were amongst the highest input energies for Barley production. The lowest share of energy consumption belonged to human labour and biocide. The energy productivity was estimated to be 0.17 kg MJ-1. The ratio of output energy to input energy was approximately 2.27. In this research, the highest value of GHG emission belonged to diesel fuel with (201.34 kg CO2 eq ha-1) of total emission and followed by Chemicalfertilizer with (101.3 and 6.99 CO2 eq ha-1 for Nitrogen and Phosphate). The least amount of GHG emissions producer input in Barley production was pesticides with amount of11.47 CO2 eq ha-1 of total GHG emissions. Using chemical fertilizer (especially nitrogen) more than need led to high amount of GHG emission. Moreover, soil and water pollutions are the results of using high amounts of chemical fertilizer which makes agriculture environment unfriendly.

Energy Use Pattern and GHG Emission for Barley Production in Mazandaran Province Keywords:

Agriculture , Chemical fertilizer , Energy indexes , Environment , GHG emission