Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
crop production. The main uncertainty in the beef to pork redistribution
was the use of ∆rA. This was because that land may be used for either
perennial or annual crops, or to support either food or biofuel feedstock
production. It might also be allowed to revert back to rangeland or natural
habitat, depending on the economic pressures. Hence, the four scenarios
represent only a few of the many possible ways that livestock industries
and soil carbon stocks can interact. When the GHG emissions from the
Canadian livestock industries were assessed individually, the LCC ap-
proach allowed them to be treated as closed systems. However, once farm
type interactions are introduced, inter-commodity land use changes can no
longer be viewed in complete isolation because the different intensities of
land do not result in equal exchanges of land areas.
Exploring scenarios for the redistribution shifted the focus from direct
impacts on ∆cA to indirect impacts on ∆rA. However, it was not the ob-
jective of this paper to determine whether or not repopulating ∆ rA with
beef was necessarily the best use of the residual crop land. Because these
scenarios were only applicable to ∆rA, this assessment does not describe
the carbon footprint of the entire production system associated with each
of the four scenarios. For example, the annual fi eld crops in Scenario 2 by
themselves, do not replace the protein that could have been produced if
either Scenario 3 or 4 had been the chosen land use option. Even though
these last two scenarios have not been found to mitigate GHG emissions,
both of them resulted in higher beef protein production. Also, there are
recognized ancillary environmental benefi ts to beef production that en-
hance sustainability [43], but this broader perspective on the overall sus-
tainability of this production system was beyond the scope of this paper.
Therefore, this scenario assessment should be treated as a demonstration
of how the annual GHG emission budgets and soil carbon interact under
changes in land use.
6.4 CONCLUSIONS
The model presented in this paper, was developed in order to quantify
the impacts of changes in annual GHG emissions and soil carbon on
the carbon footprint of the Canadian livestock industry. The paper also
