Unit process data collection for specialty crop production.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) collects and releases a substantial amount of commodity crop production data to inform market activities. These data are frequently transformed into unit process data, which are used in life cycle assessments of agricultural production or agriculturally derived products. The USDA has recently transformed its Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data into high quality and transparent unit processes that represent United States production for nine commodity crops in the USDA Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Commons. However, neither high quality and transparent unit process data, nor complete input and yield data for specialty crops exist. State enterprise crop budgets are a consistent data source for specialty crop production and have been used in past agricultural LCAs (Adom et al. 2012, Matlock et al. 2008 and Eranki and Dale 2010). One of the major objectives of this project was to determine the reliability of “state enterprise crop budgets” as tools for collecting unit process data for crop production. This paper evaluates the applicability of state cost of production (COP) estimates, which underlie state enterprise crop budgets, to LCA. State extension agricultural economists compile enterprise crop budgets from surveys of horticultural scientists, agricultural suppliers, marketers, crop consultants, and other local and regional stakeholders. The crop budgets define a range of management practices that vary based on local conditions and estimate the costs and revenues associated with production. Crop budgets are pragmatic and based on survey results from industry experts. However, crop budget survey methods are not necessarily standardized and may not be a reliable sampling of the industry. They can have a varying level of technological, temporal, and geographic specificity and vary across states such that state comparisons or multi-state aggregations may not be reliable. Therefore, indiscriminately transforming enterprise crop budget data into unit process data may not be scientifically defensible. Life cycle inventories calculated from corn production unit processes developed from the 2005 Iowa state enterprise crop budget for corn will be analyzed and compared to unit processes developed from USDA crop production surveys.