| Sumario: | The writers describe the emissions inventory part of a software system for agricultural eco-management. The software package they discuss, known as Environmental Management for Agriculture, has been developed for use by farmers and their advisers to enable them to improve their entire farm environmental performance. They point out that the approach utilized for estimating farm emissions is necessarily simplistic, because it relies on readily available data and heuristics to derive broad estimates of emissions, including losses of nitrate via leaching, pesticides, and gaseous losses of ammonia and methane from livestock. They point out that it is not the aim of the system to provide accurate measures of these emissions, but to provide the farmer with data to identify trends that vary with farm techniques, thereby showing that as practices improve, emission levels also improve. The writers consider the techniques generally used within industry and the difficulties in transferring such techniques to the farm.
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