Life Cycle Analysis of the grass fed red meat industry

Summary

As a major land manager and source of significant greenhouse emissions, the red meat industry could have significant opportunities to enhance the environmental performance of the Australian economy. To achieve optimal environmental outcomes and target management interventions, managers and policy makers need performance information based on best practice data acquisition and analysis. Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) is an information tool offering an holistic perspective of the environment and the technical system being assessed, and it is for this reason that it is becoming increasingly commonplace in industrial and agricultural management.
Detailed process analysis of farm resource use and productivity was complimented by input-output analysis of service inputs in a hybrid LCA. This report addresses environmental performance indicators including: energy use; global warming potential; solid waste production; eutrophication potential; soil acidification potential and nutrient balances (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). The energy and global warming results are comparable with previously published work while the other indicators are not routinely reported for red meat LCAs. While the underlying data for water use are consistent with published results, we demonstrate the influence of different accounting approaches on the results and suggest that approaches that uncritically include rainfall produce counter-intuitive results.
This project enhanced the quality of information available to policy makers and others who want to know the answer to questions like: “What is the carbon footprint of red meat?”, “How much energy is used in making red meat?” and “Is much waste produced?” The project also tested an improved suite of agricultural performance indicators for assessing natural resource management issues in LCA.