Analysis of Energy Use and Environmental Impacts of Pistachio (Pistacia vera L.) in Conventional and Bio-friendly Production Systems

Humankind and natural ecosystems are facing global changes. There is a clear influence of human activities due to the use of contaminant energies among other factors. Therefore, it is a priority to find clean energies with less environmental impacts coming from bio-friendly production systems. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to examine energy use patterns, greenhouse gas emission (CO2, N2O, and CH4) and life cycle assessment (LCA) in pistachio (Pistacia vera L.) production systems. As experimental plots, we selected one plantation located in the North Khorasan province of Iran. Data were collected from two pistachio orchards with conventional (CPS) and with bio-friendly production systems (BPS). In 2 seasonal years, from 2020 to 2021, a functional unit of 1000 kg pistachio was used. The results indicated that total energy consumption in the conventional pistachio production system reached 58,759.86 MJ ha-1 in comparison to bio-friendly pistachio production systems with 31,149.02 MJ ha-1, accounting for 36.0% of fertilizer energy, 26% of diesel energy, and 12.7% of electricity. The energy use efficiency for the CPS and BPS was respectively 0.38 and 0.73, and also energy productivity for CPS reached 0.01 kg MJ ha-1 and BPS 0.02 kg MJ ha-1. Results indicated that the direct energy for CPS was 19.6% and for BPS 39.03%, but indirect energy inputs for CPS and BPS registered 76.4 and 60.5%, respectively. It was found that the non-renewable form of energy input for CPS was 83.8% and for BPS just 57.6%. We conclude that chemicals (pesticides, fertilizers), fuel and electricity were the most important inputs for the pistachio production system, which also influenced total CO2, N2O and CH4 emissions due to chemical inputs for CPS. In CPS and BPS, the total global warming potential (GWP) was 2445.24 and 1507.99 kg CO2eq ha-1, respectively. Compared to CPS, the application of the BPS method reduces total damage to human health, ecosystems, and resources.