Very cool, if true

Since I write this kind of stuff for work, I had a look at their methodology and it's a tad dodgy - either they made an error in the report, or they used the wrong Global Warming Potentials for methane and nitrous oxide, making animal rearing far worse by using the nitrous oxide GWP value for methane and vice versa. They don't include soil carbon changes from land use management and change (this is my research field) and their conclusion about US meat production not driving deforestation and environmental damage in other countries is out of date - vast swathes of Brazil are being converted to soybean production for the US market, causing major soil erosion as well as deforestation. US agriculture isn't a good proxy for the UK either -their agriculture is much more intensive than ours especially for beef production, leading to much higher emissions from manure, which I'm not sure are balanced out by the higher meat production.

It is true that meat and dairy have a bigger carbon footprint than veg products but I'm unconvinced that they haven't under-estimated the impact of tofu - soil emissions are a major part of the impact of soya production. And don't even get me started about palm oil - ripping up tropical rainforest all over SE Asia to grow that stuff is far worse than eating the odd burger.

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Thanks for that - useful to know!

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com

Yeah, the stuff about feed production causing emissions seems very wrong to me as well - all the sheep and dairy farms I know (and I used to live in the middle of Cheshire, surrounded by them) have the animals just eating grass. And with lamb, especially, a lot of lamb comes from sheep grazing on scrubland and hills which couldn't be used for crop growth. On the other hand, rice and peanuts have to be imported (I think - I've certainly never heard of anyone growing them over here) and so would be relatively more carbon-heavy than the table shows.

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Dairy farms are increasingly using imported feeds as they get more intensive but sheep rearing is still low impact in this country. But yeah, as I commented below, this analyis is based on US agriculture which is very different to ours (although we do import a lot of lamb from New Zealand, which has a higher impact).

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Actually I stand corrected on the lamb issue - as the commenter below points out, the report I found for the UK does indeed show our lamb production has higher emissions than the world average. I suspect because our low intensity production means much lower yields.

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crm.livejournal.com

double thanks for this, have you got a better graph with the weightings you suggest or will i just estimate.

also - has anyone done research on organic soya to see if it can be traced back to the rain-forest clearances, my understanding is that most of the Brazilian soya was destined to be animal feed, or an abstract ingredient in more common foods. though i reached this conclusion due to the disproportionate amount grown vs actual number of foody uses which are mostly restricted to vegans.

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lpetrazickis.livejournal.com

Huh. I would not have expected lamb to be more intensive than beef.

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channelpenguin.livejournal.com

yeah that strikes me as odd too.... surely it's pork production that's truly industrial - but they grow faster than beef cattle, I suppose. UK Beef cattle are still mainly left ou t in fields and not hevaily grain-fed/fattened, I thought??? Maybe I'm out of date... Lambs are over and done inside a year and sheep are pretty much left to themselves in fields to eat grass (and maybe turnips and stuff in winter) - at least in the UK... I think??? Anyone know better???

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The report is based on US agriculture not British.

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The pork and poultry v lamb and beef thing is interesting - on the one hand, sheep and cows are ruminants so they produce more greenhouse gases by way of methane, and pigs convert plant matter to protein more efficiently, but on the other, pigs and poultry need cereal feed whereas cows and sheep can be reared on grass alone. I tried to find a similar graph for UK produced food but haven't managed it yet.

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In the US, 'grass-fed beef' is something special; ordinary beef is fed in feedlots on grain.

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kerrypolka.livejournal.com

I don't think it is usually, but I know it is something that varies drastically by how you do it (for example, eating NZ lamb is overall more carbon-friendly than British lamb, even including the air miles, because the way lamb is raised in NZ is so much more efficient than in the UK). If they picked a particularly bad region that would skew the results quite a bit.

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simont

I was briefly confused by the idea that "Farmgate" was some sort of scandal I'd missed about wasteful production methods and "post-Farmgate emissions" meant the level of emissions after everyone hastily sorted the problem out :-)

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cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com

That's what I thought :)

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Why would milk be so much lower than beef? Some beef is actually grass-fed (ie out on a range), but milk cows have to stay close to the barn (if allowed out at all).

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Cows produce massively more milk over their lifespan than they do beef?

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Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say - milk yields for intensive dairy cows are really high these days.

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So? The cost of raising a calf to adulthood has longer to amortize as a milk cow, is that what you mean?

Maybe we should be measuring in grams of protein.

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The diagram doesn't have cost in it at all...

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The cost in emissions, I mean. Yanno, what the chart shows.

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brixtonbrood.livejournal.com

Also it's per kilo, not per calorie, which makes milk look good and cheese look bad.

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I would like to see it per calorie.

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apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com

Ah! I couldn't figure out why cheese was a different order of magnitude from milk or yogurt. But by kilo, they're including the water in milk. That doesn't give a meaningful comparison.

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This report by WWF and the Food Climate Research Network includes figures for UK production (assessed up to the 'Regional Distribution Centre - so the green bars on the graph plus the processing and transport proportion of the yellow-orange bars)

Lamb = 14.61 kg CO2e/kg (so interestingly still the highest listed, although all sheep and goat production is lumped together)
Beef = 12.14 kg CO2e/kg (in comparison to world average of 32)
Pork = 4.45 kg CO2e/kg
Turkey = 3.76 kg CO2e/kg
Chicken = 2.84 kg CO2e/kg
Eggs = 2.94 kg CO2e/kg
Broccoli = 1.94 kg CO2e/kg
Tomatoes = 3.79 kg CO2e/kg

Not sure how their methodology compares to this, the land use change bit is a bit pants but only contributes a tiny proportion anyway, but at least it's using the right GWP figures and is for the UK.

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Is it possible that Sheep make bad food animals because they're bred for hardiness and wool production rather than making oodles of meat?

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Unless you raise rare breed sheep, most commercial ones these days are bred for meat production actually. But I guess they just aren't as efficient as other food animals.

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Clearly what we need are are more efficient cybersheep.

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