Assessment and Modeling of Energy Consumption, Yield and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Irrigated Chickpea Production in Isfahan Province

This study was conducted to investigate and model the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of irrigated chickpea cultivation in Isfahan province using multilayer perceptron artificial neural network (ANN). The amount of each consumed inputs in production were collected from 110 producers of chickpea randomly by a questionnaire. The total energy consumption, product yield and energy ratio in chickpea production were calculated as 33211.18 MJ/ha, 2276.36 kg/ha, and 1.02, respectively. Nitrogen fertilizer with 9808 MJ/ha had the highest amount of consumed energy. Total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were calculated 965.20 kg CO2eq. ha-, in which, electricity and diesel fuel had the highest amount of total GHG emissions with 36% and 34%, respectively. An ANN model with 13-7-2 topology was recognized as the best model for prediction of yield and total GHG emissions. Based on this ANN model, the values of determination coefficient in prediction of yield and total GHG emissions were determined as 0.929 and 0.979, respectively. The results of sensitivity analysis of the model showed that agricultural machinery inputs had the highest impact on yield and total GHG emissions.