Legumes for a farming future
Knowing that something is good for the environment isn’t necessarily enough to make people do it. The realities of living often mean that people will make decisions based on what they can afford rather than what is best for the planet. That is perfectly understandable and reasonable so it is exciting when a situation comes along where the sustainable future practice also happens to be economically viable. This is exactly the case with legumes and agriculture.
In a new paper researchers looked at legumes as the future of European agriculture but the good news is that a legume revolution is already underway in Australia.
The authors noted that legumes can increase the sustainability of agriculture as they are protein rich, increase the amount of nitrogen in soils, and reduce the need for fertilisers. In Europe a large proportion of agricultural land is used to grow grains and only two per cent to grow legumes. So these researchers wanted to evaluate the trade-offs between environmental and economic effects of integrating legumes into agricultural systems.
The good news is that the legume evolution is well under way in Australia.
Using models across five different regions in Europe they found that while legumes are undoubtedly good for the environment they are not economically attractive to farmers as a single crop. However, when they looked at introducing legumes into cropping systems they found that nitrous oxide emissions reduced by 20-30 per cent and fertiliser use was down by 25-40 per cent. Most importantly the modelling showed that in all forage agricultural systems and in two out of five arable farming systems studied, gross profit margins actually went up. The researchers concluded that diversifying cropping systems through the inclusions of legumes could be both economically and environmentally viable.
The good news is that the legume evolution is well under way in Australia.
In March 2016 a report in Farm Weekly indicated that 2015 saw a massive spike in chickpea production in northern NSW and Queensland and lentil plantings in 2016 are expected to be 35 per cent higher than five years ago as farmers are enticed by prices of up to $1250 per tonne. At this point there are predicted plantings of 245,000 hectares of lentils around Australia in 2016.
Legumes, it seems, are the way of the future; both environmentally and economically.
