How to Reduce Global Warming Potential of Crop Production in Northern China – a Farmer’s Perspective Analysis

Abstract

There is an increasing need to promote more environmentally sustainable agriculture and small-scaled farm business in the NCP. This paper adopts two key environmental indicators to improve scientific understanding of environmental impact of summer maize and winter wheat production system and explain distinct performance results from farmer’s management aspect. This paper highlights farm management diverseness and its impact on environmental performance of crop production. The farm households are grouped into three categories based on similarity on environmental impact results. The cluster analysis shows that input intensification often results in poor performance environmental damage. To realize shift from high input intensive agriculture to sustainable agriculture, multi-scale and system approaches with sufficient reference to local specificities needs to be implemented to achieve more environmental sustainable agriculture in the NCP.