Many companies and organizations involved in the agricultural industry have started conducting Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) as a way to understand their processes, find efficiencies, improve quality and leave smaller environmental footprints. The United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library is working to create a library of all agriculture-related LCAs. They are using the United Soybean Board’s 2010 publication, “Life Cycle Impact of Soybean Production and Soy Industrial Products” as a model for other commodity crops to follow. Dr. Simon Liu, Director of the National Agricultural Library, spoke recently about the value of LCAs and his agency’s work to make the process easier and more reliable for researchers.
He said that while LCAs offer great value to companies, conducting an LCA can be a daunting task. The huge amounts of data that must be gathered and analyzed can be very costly and time consuming, if the data can even be located. There is little sharing across institutions, and even when data is located or collected, questions remain about its quality.
Dr. Liu pointed to the soybean industry as a leader in agriculture LCAs. He said that the industry is tackling the difficult task of finding and pulling together the relevant data about their product from a variety of sources. He discussed how the soybean LCA pulled from a range of meticulously detailed data sources in the construction of its model.
Building on the USB model, the National Agricultural Library is attempting to make the data collection process easier for all crop LCA researchers by developing its LCA Digital Commons project. The project will identify, extract, transform and validate LCA data sets from across crops and make them available to researchers who can then analyze and interpret the data and identify where further research is needed. This will save time and money and improve the quality and dependability of data for all agricultural interests.
