Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
in terms of food security. Consequently, the
livestock industry must continue to improve its
efficiency of production, while lowering its
environmental footprint. Farm-based LCA
offers the livestock industry a structured meth-
odology to assess improved practices and
approaches that will help reduce their environ-
mental impact while providing high quality
food for human consumption. A cradle-to-
farm gate LCA can help identify components or
processes within the primary production cycle
that should be targeted to reduce environmen-
tal impact. Because of the significant variation
in methodologies used in LCA, particularly for
estimating GHG emissions, caution must be
exercised when comparing across studies.
Efforts to standardize LCA methodology in
future will help improve the usefulness of these
types of comparisons.
Clearly, meat and milk production have a
'cost' in terms of GHGs and other environmental
impacts, and LCA helps quantify those impacts.
Technologies and practices have been identified
that can help limit resource use and resulting
environmental consequences of meat and milk
production, with improvements in productivity,
feed conversion efficiency, diet formulation and
reproductive performance the first steps in
reducing the ecological footprint of livestock
production systems.
It must also be recognized that GHG inten-
sity of meat and milk production does not
consider the other beneficial roles of ruminant
production systems. Ruminants make a useful
contribution to society in that they produce high
quality energy and protein for human consump-
tion from land areas and cellulosic materials
that would otherwise be very difficult to exploit.
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