Elias Marvinney, PhD
Project Scientist, Independent Consultant
Dr. Elias Marvinney is a Project Scientist with the Industrial Ecology Lab in the UC Davis School of Civil & Environmental Engineering. His doctoral work in Horticulture and Agronomy at UC Davis culminated in the development of a new Life Cycle Assessment model that forms the basis of much of his current research at UC Davis.
His work in life cycle assessment and analysis for the food and agricultural sector is focused on integration of carbon storage stocks, flows and processes into LCA models for various agricultural systems, including perennial fruit and nut crops, apiculture, alfalfa, rangeland beef, dairy nutrient management, and food processing (cultured meats, almond milk, and food loss/waste).
Dr. Marvinney partners extensively with state agencies including the California Air Resources Board and California Department of Food and Agriculture as well as crop commodity boards including the Almond Board of California, California Walnut Board, California Prune Board, California Pistachio Research Board, and Citrus Research Board; and corporations such as Califia Farms, The Wonderful Company, and Sunkist as both a UC researcher and an independent consultant.
In the course of these projects, he has authored and contributed to white papers detailing the environmental impacts of various agricultural sectors, operations, and product, as well as peer reviewed articles in Journal of Animal Science; International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment; Energies; Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems; and Journal of Industrial Ecology. His complete CV is available here.
What does LCA look like?
Research Design
In agriculture, we are used to thinking of a production system at the local level—what happens in the field, or orchard, and during post-harvest operations. To get a complete picture of the environmental impact of a crop, we need to zoom out to the global and regional processes that make that local production possible.
Any useful model of the life cycle of an agricultural production system needs to include processes at Global, Regional, and Local scales to capture all energy flows within the system. Take a look at the diagram below, which captures the life cycle of a citrus orchard, but is equally applicable to other perennial cropping systems.