Valutazione ambientale della produzione del frumento tenero: biologico vs. convenzionale.

In the last decades farming has changed in a significant way, it was due to an increase of environment sensitivity. The necessity to improve the life quality in economic, energetic and wellbeing point of view took as consequence the need to link the agricultural productivity with the interests of land management and environmental protection. These concepts, originated and spread in the ‘90s, focused attention on development of technologies, practices of production and agricultural rules concerning sustainability both on environmental and productivity point of view. The purpose of this thesis was to describe the different environmental impact of organic wheat against intensive one. The soft wheat was chosen because of its international and national importance. The study and data collection focused on a hypothetical “farm type” closed to Padova. In order to analyze the impact of these two different types of production, to evaluate the environmental impacts of production processes and to identify possible improvements of the product or its processing, LCA decision-making tool was used. Specifically, two different approaches of LCA were used: the Attributional LCA was adopted to compare intensive wheat production techniques and organic ones. The Consequential LCA approach dealt with the developing of five possible scenarios resulting from cropping system conversion. The first scenarios involved the complete “substitutability” of intensive wheat and organic one, while the other four scenarios were created considering organic production as a new product, therefore, with a different allocation in the market. The results were obtained using the software SimaPro 7.2.4., the evaluation method used was Ecoindicator 99H/A. The final results showed distinct differences between organic and intensive production. Organic production seems to be the optimal environmental solution to reduce impact, under the “substitutable” hypothesis. Instead when the two types of production have different distribution in the market, the organic production is advantageous only within a short transport distance. 8 The scenarios considered were limited and could include many other possible variables. This work showed how it could be useful and interesting to use the LCA methodology and how, through the Consequential LCA method used, within the limits of this system, it could be assess the consequences of farm changes on the environment.