Livestock or crop? Which deserves more investment to reduce greywater footprint emissions and improve water use efficiency?

Yuedong Xiao, Fengtai Zhang (), Ruiqi Su, Dalai Ma, Hongbo Liao, Xingyu Yang and Guofang Gong
Additional contact information
Yuedong Xiao: Chongqing University of Technology
Fengtai Zhang: Chongqing University of Technology
Ruiqi Su: The University of Manchester
Dalai Ma: Chongqing University of Technology
Hongbo Liao: Chongqing Institute of Quality and Standardization
Xingyu Yang: Chongqing University of Technology
Guofang Gong: Chongqing University of Technology

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2024, vol. 26, issue 3, No 72, 7409-7435

Abstract: Abstract There are two distinct directions of agricultural development when considering only crops and livestock. They are integrated crops and livestock systems (ICLS) and separated crops and livestock systems (SCLS). When evaluating agricultural greywater footprint (GWF), nitrogen cycling and nitrogen fixation in ICLS reduce nitrogen emissions always neglected. A novel study that aims to efficiently use water and reduce water pollution in agriculture to guide investment between crops and livestock is appealing. Based on the panel data of 11 provinces in the Yangtze River Economic Zone from 2007 to 2018, we employ the slacks-based model to evaluate agricultural water use efficiency (AWUE). GWF plays an unexpected output in the model. Furthermore, we compare both AWUE and GWF between ICLS and SCLS. The results show: (i) ICLS produce approximately 4.76 million cubic meters GWF less than SCLS, 1.89% of total GWF emission of SCLS. The greywater footprint emissions of the province’s unit-mass meat (GWFM) increased by an average of 26.30%. By contrast, the greywater footprint emissions of unit-mass grains (GWFG) decreased by an average of 27.37%. (ii) ICLS improves the AWUE of the province to the highest level of 10.78% compared with SCLS. (iii) If government allocates capital investment in crops and livestock freely, an additional 1% of crops investment would increase by 1.94% of GWFG while livestock could reduce GWFG by 2.12%. Investment in livestock is valid.

Keywords: Integrated crop-livestock system; Slacks-based model; Nitrogen; Greywater footprint; Economic scale; Food structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-023-03013-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:26:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s10668-023-03013-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-023-03013-6

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().