TNAU Energy Soft 2016: An Efficient Energy Audit Tool to Identify Energy Saving Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

The face of the earth surface has been changed by the human activities particularly land use changes. World agriculture occupies about 38% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. The modern day agricultural economy has become more energy-intensive. Sustainability in agriculture should ensure both agricultural productivity and environmental safety. Agriculture being one of the important consumer of energy, particularly fossil fuels, generates greenhouse gas emissions. It is very important to curtail the use of high energy and non-renewable energy sources in farming activity. Further, reducing the use of non-renewable energy sources and increasing the efficiency of energy use, would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector. Energy auditing is a method to understand which component of the technology involves high energy and inefficient in generating outputs. TNAU Energy Soft 2016 is an energy audit tool, which helps the scientists working on agricultural technologies to identify the better input energy source combination (renewable/non-renewable/commercial/non-commercial) of technology without doing repeated and expensive field trials. This is a simple, user-friendly windows based desktop application which facilitates easy selection of input sources; adds new energy source, crop and field operations; compares six treatments at a stretch. The resulting output includes detailed analysis and abstract of energy use of a single treatment, individual field operation-wise energy use within a treatment, net energy benefit, energy efficiency and category-wise energy use. The TNAU Energy Soft 2016 helps scientist to ensure sustainability in agricultural productivity, environmental safety and sustainable bioeconomy through finding the ways and means of reducing non-renewable fossil fuel based inputs and increasing the use of renewable and biological resources.