Environmental Assessment of Crops for Lentil (Lens culinaris)-Based Rotations: Identifying the Most Sustainable Options

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Hamdollah Eskandari

Seyed Nader Mosavian

Department of Agriculture, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

10.22067/ijpr.2025.95720.1119

Abstract

Introduction
Lentil (Lens culinaris), as one of the oldest cultivated legumes in the world, holds a special position in ensuring food security and maintaining the sustainability of agricultural systems, particularly under dry and semi-arid conditions. The reduction of biodiversity in continuous monocrop systems have numerous negative effects on production factors, including soil, water, and the overall agro-ecosystem. Therefore, adopting appropriate crop rotations is essential to reduce the disadvantages of continuous cropping to achieve sustainable production. Lentil, due to its ability to biologically fix atmospheric nitrogen, not only requires less nitrogen fertilizer but also improves soil fertility for subsequent crops. However, the placement of lentil in a suitable crop rotation is equally important for lentil itself, since preceding crops influence weed populations, disease incidence, residual soil moisture, and soil structure, all of which affect lentil growth and productivity. Intensive farming and monocropping systems have imposed significant environmental costs with direct impacts on the health of natural ecosystems. This highlights the importance of considering environmental aspects in crop production. In other words, crop production systems should aim to maintain optimal yields while minimizing environmental burdens. Based on previous studies, crops such as wheat, rapeseed, rye, maize, potato, and barley have been suggested as potential candidates for inclusion in lentil-based rotations. However, these recommendations have mainly focused on their effects on grain yield, while the possible environmental impacts of growing these crops have not been considered. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to compare the environmental impacts of the proposed rotation crops with lentil and to identify those with the lowest negative impacts on the environment. The aim is to design sustainable lentil crop rotation programs that ensure desirable grain yields while minimizing the environmental footprint of this important food crop.
 
Materials and Methods
To compare the environmental impacts of seven alternative crop rotations with lentil (including wheat, barley, rye, maize, rapeseed, potato, and chickpea), SimaPro software (version 9.5) was employed. Each crop was defined as an independent process within the software environment, and data related to inputs, yields, and transportation were extracted from the Ecoinvent database using the allocation approach. This database is recognized as the most comprehensive global reference for life cycle assessment studies, providing global average values that enable comparability of results with international studies. Moreover, it saves time and costs while providing access to data that are otherwise very difficult to measure in the field. For environmental impact assessment, the ReCiPe 2016 Endpoint (v1.08) method was applied. This method aggregates a wide range of impacts into three endpoint categories: human health, ecosystem quality, and resource consumption. Such aggregation facilitates easier interpretation of results and decision-making while offering a comprehensive and integrated view of environmental performance. To quantitatively compare the impacts of each rotation option, the data were processed using the relative normalization method. In this method, the impact value of each crop within a category is expressed as a percentage relative to the highest value in that category. This provides a clear visual way to identify alternatives with the highest and lowest environmental impacts. Finally, an inventory of emissions and the impact values of each crop across the three categories was compiled, forming the basis for selecting the most sustainable lentil rotation option.
 
Results and Discussion
Except for the effect of rye on water consumption in dryland ecosystems (which was negative), the impacts of other crops (as well as the other categories for rye) were positive. The negative value associated with rye cultivation indicates an overall favorable effect of this crop in terms of water use, as it avoids higher water consumption compared with other cropping options in the domains of water use and dryland ecosystems. According to the results, rye and barley caused the greatest environmental damage in terms of human health, while rapeseed and potato had the lowest impacts and were therefore the most favorable crops in this respect. The difference between rye and potato and rapeseed in the human health category was 48% and 65%, respectively. In addition, rye, rapeseed, and barley exerted the most negative environmental impacts on ecosystems, whereas potato had the lowest impact in this category. The findings of the present study demonstrated that all the examined crops had their greatest environmental impacts on human health, as this category accounted for the largest share of environmental effects across all crops. Following human health, the ecosystem category was the second most affected, while the impacts on the resources category were negligible. Therefore, it can be concluded that in assessing the environmental impacts of rye, barley, rapeseed, potato, maize, and wheat in rotation with lentil, particular attention should be given to their effects on human health.
 
Conclusions
The greatest environmental impact of the crops proposed for rotation with lentil was observed in the human health category, while their impacts related to resource consumption were minimal. Among the studied crops, rye and barley imposed the highest burdens on human health, whereas rapeseed and potato had the lowest impacts. Therefore, to reduce the environmental load in lentil-based crop rotations, it is recommended to avoid including rye and barley as much as possible, and instead to incorporate rapeseed and potato. Accordingly, a four-year environmentally sustainable rotation plan can be suggested as rapeseed–lentil–potato–lentil.

Keywords

Ecosystem

Environmental resources

Human health

Life cycle assessment

Sustainable production

Subjects

• Agronomy

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Authors retain the copyright. This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

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