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Agricultural production must increase to feed a growing and wealthier population, as well as to satisfy increasing demands for biomaterials and biomass-based energy. At the same time, deforestation and land-use change need to be minimized in order to preserve biodiversity and maintain carbon stores in vegetation and soils. Consequently, agricultural land use needs to be intensified in order to increase food production per unit area of land. Here we use simulations of AgMIP’s Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI) phase 1 to assess implications of input-driven intensification (water, nutrients) on crop yield and yield stability, which is an important aspect in food security. We find region- and crop-specific responses for the simulated period 1980–2009 with broadly increasing yield variability under additional nitrogen inputs and stabilizing yields under additional water inputs (irrigation), reflecting current patterns of water and nutrient limitation. The different models of the GGCMI ensemble show similar response patterns, but model differences warrant further research on management assumptions, such as variety selection and soil management, and inputs as well as on model implementation of different soil and plant processes, such as on heat stress, and parameters. Higher variability in crop productivity under higher fertilizer input will require adequate buffer mechanisms in trade and distribution/storage networks to avoid food price volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cellulosic biofuels face significant problems of feedstock aggregation and logistics leading to poor economies of scale. The current model is for relatively small biorefineries using feedstock gathered locally. Here a depot‐based decentralized biorefinery system is explored to estimate the US Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) compliant corn stover ethanol production potential in the US Midwest. Depots serve to aggregate, pretreat, and densify biomass (via pellets) and thereby enable very large biorefineries using a decentralized system to collect these pellets. Such a corn‐stover based decentralized system using depots would establish one or two very large‐scale decentralized biorefineries capable of processing about 8–12% of the total corn stover available in the US Midwest. These decentralized biorefineries are economically competitive with the centralized biorefineries. About 55–153 depots could supply the pretreated pellets to the individual decentralized biorefineries leading to an annual production of 1.02–2.91 billion liters of cellulosic ethanol fuel. Most of the participating depots are located in Illinois and Iowa. The total EISA‐compliant ethanol fuel produced in the decentralized system is 2.82–4.07 billion liters per year. The ethanol selling price in the depot‐based decentralized biorefinery system varies between US$0.67 and US$0.72 L−1. The greenhouse gas (GHG) savings from cellulosic ethanol in the decentralized system compared to gasoline are 3.35–4.84 Tg CO2 year−1. Importantly, the total capital investment per annual volume of ethanol in the decentralized biorefinery ranges from US$0.71 L1 to US$1.15 L1, while the total capital investment per annual ethanol volume in the centralized biorefinery is US$1.98 L−1. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]