A Preliminary Study on a New Approach to Estimate Water Resource Allocation: The Net Water Footprint Applied to Animal Products

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• 作者：Alberto Stanislao Atzori ; ^{asatzori@uniss.it" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Caterina Canalis ; Ana Helena Dias Francesconi ; Giuseppe Pulina
• 关键词：Evapotranspiration ; water use efficiency ; milk ; meat ; ecological footprint ; livestock ; cattle ; environment ; crop ; ruminant
• 刊名：Agriculture and Agricultural Science Procedia
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：8
• 期：Complete
• 页码：50-57
• 全文大小：93 K

文摘

We propose the Net Waterfootprint (WFP_net) method to estimate the water footprint (WFP) of food products, in alternative to the current WFP method, based on absolute values. We compared the WFP and WFP_net methods for cattle milk and meat production in different feed efficiency (high and low) and crop water use efficiency (WUE; high, medium and low) scenarios under Mediterranean conditions. The WFP values were, on average, much higher than the WFP_net values for both meat and milk. The WFP_net method appears to be able to properly quantify the water consumption needed for animal food production.