Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The production of vegetable oil is strongly intertwined with the production of feed.
Their value is more or less the same so that, based on these data, the soybean cake
cannot be considered as a residue but as a co-product. This implies that part of the
acreage attributed to oil production should be attributed to meat.
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Indeed, but precisely what part? What proportion of the soya crop, and of oilseed crops
in general, should be attributed to animal feed and what proportion to vegetable oil?
One possibility is to allocate land-take by weight: in other words the same number of
square metres is assigned to a kilo of oil as to a kilo of meal. However, this distorts the
picture because once the meal is converted inefficiently into meat it is worth far less per
kilo in terms of human nourishment than the oil. It means, for example, that sunflower oil
requires the same amount of land as soya oil (for a given total crop weight) even though
twice as much sunflower oil is produced as soya oil.
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It therefore makes more sense to allocate land-take to oil and meal through an assessment
of their value as end products. If we assume that the conversion ratio of soya meal to meat
is 4:1 (a more correct ratio is 4.4:1), and that a kilo of meat is of the same value as a kilo
of oil then we can apportion the land-take of each commodity on that basis. Table 3 shows
the very different results that follow from allocating land requirements to the oil alone, by
weight, and by their market value.
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Table 3: Area of Land Required to Produce Soya and Sunflower Commodities by
Various Allocation Methods
All values in m
2
. The methodology for this table is taken from Elferink
et al
(2007), however the values have been
calculated by the author.
Sanderine Nonhebel and colleagues have calculated that, if land-take was assigned on
the basis of the market value of the co-products, the Dutch consumer could be provided
with 10.6 kg a year (29 grams a day) of pork with negligible land-take, because it had been
solely fed on low-value residues from sugar and potatoes; or 29 kg a year (81 grams a day)
of pork fed on residues from sugar, potatoes and soya, with an average land-take of about
5.5m
2
per kilo; or 55 kg a year (150 grams a day) from these three byproducts supplemen-
just from 60 per cent of available residues, which suggests that if 55 kg of pork were fed on
