Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
all available residues, then it would take considerably less than 8m 2 of land per kilo, and a
lot less land than the area of around 11m 2 required to produce a kilo of soya oil.
In other words, the more pork (or meat) that is consumed, the more land per kilo is
needed to produce it, because a small quantity of meat can be reared on more or less
worthless byproducts, while larger quantities require high value oilseed meal, or dedicated
grain crops. The relative environmental impact of pork fat and vegetable oil can be viewed
schematically in Fig 2, where the land requirement for a kilo of pork increases as consump-
tion increases, following the hockey-stick curve described, whereas the land requirement
for soya and sunflower oil is constant. Under current conditions, large amounts of pork (and
hence pig fat) can be consumed before its land-take starts to approach that of vegetable oil
- but if the consumption of pig fat increased, the amount of soya fat eaten and soya meal
available would decline, and this would affect the land take of the pork.
Figure 2. Land Requirements of Pork, Soya Oil and Sunflower Oil
The steeper the gradient, the more land required per kilo consumed. The gradient AB shows the land requirement
when pigs are fed on food wastes and low value residues. As per capita consumption increases, at BC, pigs must be fed
on oilseed meal which uses more land (approximately the same amount of land as sunfl ower oil). CD shows land require-
ment when pigs are fed on grain, and so require more land per kilo than both soya and sunflower oil. In the Netherlands,
point B is at 10.6 kg per year, and point C is at 29 kg per year (if the relative land take of meal and oil are allocated
according to market value).
It is no doubt possible to get too pedantic about the land requirements for different oil
and fat products. But the figures above also demonstrate how the vegetable oil industry and
the livestock industry have become reliant upon each other - indeed they feed each other.
The more vegetable oil we produce, the more meal there is to feed to livestock; and the
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