A tradeoff frontier for global nitrogen use and cereal production

By N. Mueller, Paul C. West, James Gerber, G. MacDonald, Stephen Polasky, J. Foley. 2014

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nitrogen fertilizer use across the world’s croplands enables high-yielding agricultural production, but does so at considerable environmental cost. Imbalances between nitrogen applied and nitrogen used by crops contributes to excess nitrogen in the environment, with negative consequences for water quality, air quality, and climate change. Here we utilize crop input-yield models to investigate how to minimize nitrogen application while achieving crop production targets. We construct a tradeoff frontier that estimates the minimum nitrogen fertilizer needed to produce a range of maize, wheat, and rice production levels. Additionally, we explore potential environmental consequences by calculating excess nitrogen along the frontier using a soil surface nitrogen balance model. We find considerable opportunity to achieve greater production and decrease both nitrogen application and post-harvest excess nitrogen. Our results suggest that current (circa 2000) levels of cereal production could be achieved with ∼50% less nitrogen application and ∼60% less excess nitrogen. If current global nitrogen application were held constant but spatially redistributed, production could increase ∼30%. If current excess nitrogen were held constant, production could increase ∼40%. Efficient spatial patterns of nitrogen use on the frontier involve substantial reductions in many high-use areas and moderate increases in many low-use areas. Such changes may be difficult to achieve in practice due to infrastructure, economic, or political constraints. Increases in agronomic efficiency would expand the frontier to allow greater production and environmental gains.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Environmental Chemistry, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/728ffda11e0a76d1946409bfa0128d2f235accc9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Agronomy and Crop Science

1. Pete Smith
2. Anubhav Jain
3. Paul C. West

In Environmental Chemistry

1. R. Griffiths
2. Keith Paustian

In Soil Science

1. Pete Smith
2. A. Bondeau

Citations in the corpus

• Global change pressures on soils from land use and management (2016, background): “It has been estimated that current levels of global cereal production could be maintained while decreasing global nitrogen application by 50% (Mueller et al., 2014).”