Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Ag Irrigation Outweigh Emissions Costs

Sep 16, 2026

By Jayme DeLoss

Irrigating U.S. crops prevents higher greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding land conversion, groundbreaking new research by Colorado State University shows.

Agricultural irrigation allows the United States to grow more food on less land. If irrigation were suddenly shut off, the land change required to make up for lost yield would produce significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than those emitted by irrigating – 363 times more.

CSU scientists estimate the emissions saved by avoiding land-use change would equate to 363 years’ worth of today’s U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions from irrigation.

Converting natural ecosystems to agricultural use releases carbon that’s stored in soil and vegetation. Land use and land conversion for agriculture to produce food, fiber and fuel contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions, the study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states.

“It was clear from this work that irrigation has a net positive effect on emissions,” said lead author Avery Driscoll, who conducted the research as a CSU Ph.D. student. “The avoided emissions from reductions in indirect land-use change were much greater than the direct emissions, and that could decline further with electrification.”

Source : colostate.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids