Legume-Modified Rotations Deliver Nutrition With Lower Environmental Impact

"Introducing legumes to crop rotations could contribute toward healthy and sustainable diet transitions, but the current evidence base is fragmented across studies that evaluate specific aspects of sustainability and nutrition in isolation. Few previous studies have accounted for interactions among crops, or the aggregate nutritional output of rotations, to benchmark the efficiency of modified cropping sequences. We applied life cycle assessment to compare the environmental efficiency of ten rotations across three European climatic zones in terms of delivery of human and livestock nutrition."

• ¹School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom
• ²Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg, Germany
• ³Scotland's Rural College, West Mains Road, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• ⁴Department of Botany, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
• ⁵School of Engineering, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland