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This study conducted a life cycle assessment of new techniques and approaches in rice paddy cultivation. We evaluated reclaimed land in Hachirogata, located in Japan’s Akita Prefecture. Non-puddling cultivation is a technique of planting rice without the puddling. A rotary plow is used to plant the rice in finely crushed soil. Non-puddling allows a delay in irrigation. Thus, the soil is less likely to become deoxidized and a smaller amount of methane gas is released from the disturbed soil. Sparse planting is a technique whereby the planting stalk density is reduced by 30% (21 stalks/m2 to 15 stalks/m2), thereby reducing the material costs of producing seedlings. We found that use of the non-puddling technique reduced overall GHG emissions to 69% of those produced by rice cultivation using puddling. With sparse planting, GHG emissions were only reduced by a small amount to 93% of that of full planting. The current work shows that the appropriate mixture of sparse planting and non-puddling cultivation is necessary to obtain the greatest reduction in GHG emissions. Discipline: Agricultural environment Additional key words: Life Cycle Assessment, rice production This paper reports the results obtained in a joint project on “Agriculture, forestry and fisheries, food industry science and technology research promotion business” sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Present address: 4 Akita Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station (Akita, Akita 010-1231, Japan) *Corresponding author: e-mail shimura@affrc.go.jp Received 31 December 2015; accepted 14 June 2016. Introduction Global warming is an environmental problem resulting in catastrophic climate change, creating climate disasters, such as a global rise in sea level, all of which have been attributed to the anthropogenic contributions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Agriculture and associated production activities have been identified as one of the causes of these greenhouse gases (FAO 2016). In rice fields that account for about half of the cultivated area in Japan, methane released from the decomposition of organic matter and other processes contributes to 78% of GHGs from those rice fields (Tsuruta & Ozaki 1999). The contribution of agriculture is not limited to direct emissions from rice fields. The upstream environmental impacts including those of fertilizer and pesticide production must be taken into account in planning effective mitigation measures. Therefore, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or the accounting of life cycle GHG emissions (carbon footprint) has already been applied to agriculture (EDF 2016). One of the important characteristics of LCA in agriculture is that direct GHG emissions from the fields, including those of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, have considerable effects on the results. For instance, since the volume of methane released accounts for 68% of the total greenhouse gases released during the life cycle (Hayashi et al. 2010), the assessment of direct GHG emissions is important in LCA of organic rice production systems (Blengini & Busto 2009, Hokazono et al. 2009, Hayashi et al. 2011, Hokazono & Hayashi 2012, Eduardo A. et al. 2015). Moreover, direct GHG emissions are dependent on agricultural practices, such as the type of manure and

Improvement Potential of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Paddy Fields: Assessing Influence of Sparse Transplanting and Non-puddling