ESEL Paper Review_20111126
By Hong Guo

1,Title and Author
Title: Exploring a Water/Energy Trade-off in Regional Sourcing of livestock Feed Crops

Authors:
Martin C.Heller*and Gregory A.Keoleain
Center for Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, 3012 Dana Building, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1041, United States
Journal: ES&T

2. Summary of Paper

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the water stress due to irrigation of feed crops across the US and compare that resource demand with the energy resource demend with the energy resources needed for irrigation pumping, fertilizer production, and transport of those feed crops to a given destination. The author apply integrated resource management principles to the livestock feed supply chain.
The data for irrigation intensity, irrigation pumping energy us and water stress are given by the state government and institute. the author build the very detail relationship between energy and water by above data for each state in the US
However we also know that the decisions for tradeoff between water and energy also be made in consideration of a collection of a price, availability and timing and social considerations. Moreover, the environmental factors such as nutrient cycling should be considered。
For the physically factors, the distance is a important point here. The distance between livestock and feed crops impact the feasibility of utilizing animals manures as a nutrient sources. The long distance for transport is economically prohibitive here.As a conclusion, this paper focuses on crop production within the US and the balance for the water and energy consumption.

3. Contribution:

There is a great interesting in then environmental impact on the international trade in the agricultural area. This paper uses the environmental modelWaterGAP2 on the water stress and impact to resources calculation and modeling. This model provide a basis to compare and assess current water resources and water use in different parts of the world and give the integrated long-term perspective of the impacts of global change on the water sector. I think this is the key point for our lab. When we do some watershed management, we can use this model to predict to the to simulate the macro-scale behavior of the terrestrial water cycle for estimating the water resources, and the global water use model computes water use for the micro-scale(households, industry, irrigation and livestock). And we can combine the energy concept into here to draw the energy consumption flow.

4,Contact: mcheller@umich.edu