Designing Cropping System for Multiple Benefits of Intensive Agriculture.

The agricultural intensification with substantial resource consumption and environmental costs has lead the push for management alternatives meeting the multiple goals of conserving natural resources, protecting environment, and meeting increased demand for cereals. It is unknowns whether adopting alternative farming practice will manage multiple benefits and have enough incentive to lead farmers. Here, we address this challenge by six-year experiment with reducing wheat growing and improving crop management to alter conventionally doubling wheat/maize rotation system in the north China plain with server groundwater consumption and high greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Reducing wheat growing significantly decrease net groundwater use, and three harvests in two years with improved management can produce similar yield with less N fertilizer use and low environmental costs, and sustainably grounder water use. Optimal double cropping system achieve highest yield and net benefit, but still high N and groundwater use. Net GHG balance for all four management alternatives ranged from 764 to -5222 kg CO₂ eq per ha per year, in contrast to large GHG emission with 19820 kg CO₂ eq per ha per year. We suggest no one management alternatives would be superior for all performance characteristics, but that different sets of trade-offs could be identified, which has important implications for the identification or development of multiple-win solutions in intensive agricultural regions.