U.S. livestock production has the smallest carbon footprint per unit of production in the world.
June 27, 2016
Frank Mitloehner, an animal science and air quality specialist at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) will show you two pictures from either side of a California fence. There are 40 acres on one side occupied by a third-generation dairy with 1,000 cows. On the other are 40 acres occupied by a 5-year-old residential development with 1,000 homes.
The residential development sued the dairy over environmental quality — and won.
It didn’t matter that a subsequent comprehensive life-cycle assessment — an assessment of all environmental footprints — conducted by UC Davis researchers showed that converting farmland to residential land is 70 times more harmful to the environment.
It mattered not that the U.S. has the most environmentally friendly livestock industry in the world, as measured with scientific fact by its carbon footprint.
Never mind that the 2050 challenge looms — the need to produce 100% more animal protein within the next 34 years, in order to feed another 3 billion or so more folks.
“I caution everyone to be aware of situations like this one in California, where residences encroach to the property line of the livestock farm,” Mitloehner says. “Once they occur, it doesn’t matter how well you run your feedlot, dairy or other type of livestock operation. You will be booted out because societal pressure will be so intense that there is no way you can produce your product without causing nuisances and being unacceptable to urban people.”
Small carbon footprint
The primary contributors of anthropogenic (human-made) U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the energy sector at 31% and transportation at 27%. That’s based on research by leading U.S. scientists, as well as the U.S. EPA’s (EPA) Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Emissions and Sinks.
Mitloehner explains livestock production accounts for 4.2% of the contribution to all U.S. GHG. Of that, beef cattle account for 2.2%, dairy cattle for 1.37%, swine for 0.47% and poultry for 0.8%. Sheep and goats contribute 0.03% and 0.01%, respectively.
That’s a far cry from the global numbers of 18% and more that opponents often cite as livestock’s contribution to climate change.
That 18% number comes from a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report in 2006 called Livestock’s Long Shadow, in which authors mistakenly claimed that livestock contributed more global GHG than transportation.
One problem was that researchers applied a full life-cycle assessment to livestock — all the feed and resources used to grow and harvest the feed, the livestock, etc. For transportation, those researchers only looked at the contributions of fossil fuels burned in transportation, rather than via a life-cycle assessment, which should have included everything else associated with its production and distribution.
Mitloehner pointed this out. FAO agreed. In 2013, the FAO report Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock was published. It uses new methodology and indicates that global livestock production accounts for 14.5% of man-made GHG.
The other problem with the original FAO report is that folks took the international number and applied it to individual regions of the world. Livestock are a much larger relative contributor to GHG in some developing countries because their transportation and energy sectors are relatively small. Conversely, energy and transportation dwarf livestock’s contribution to the carbon footprint in the U.S. and other developed countries.