Key technologies improvements promote the economic-environmental sustainability in wheat production of China

As an important staple food crop, wheat plays a crucial role in global food security. However, its production faces new challenges from climate change and unreasonable management practices, hampering its sustainable production. Globally, agriculture's current focus is on exploring innovative green production technologies. This can mitigate negative environmental impacts without compromising production yields, promoting the transformation from traditional wheat production system practices. In this study, we used a life cycle assessment in combination with emergy and cost-benefit analyses to explore impacts of various technology portfolios chosen by different farmers for wheat production on the eco-environmental effects of wheat production in China. Furthermore, using a binary logistic regression model, we investigated factors that influence farmers to adopt such technologies. The results showed that compared with medium and low technological approaches, adopting a multi-technological approach decreased carbon and reactive nitrogen footprints by 30.2% and 32.1%, and 32.3% and 32.3%, while increased emergy sustainability index values by 26.7% and 20.3%, respectively. Comparatively, the multi-tech approach also increased economic benefits (by 65.4% and 86.1%, respectively). The eco-environmental sustainability benefits resulting from adopting the multi-tech approach were largely attributable to the adoption of key innovation technologies, including delaying water and nitrogen applications, wide-precision seeding, and deep tillage + rotary plowing technologies. Farmers' age, education, cooperative membership, and farm size were the main factors influencing the adoption of key production technologies, offering a potential solution to promote these technologies from the ground up. This study provides a viable model to enhance eco-environmental wheat production system sustainability and technology diffusion within dominant smallholder areas.