Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Beef Production.

A comprehensive national assessment of the sustainability of beef is being conducted by the U.S. beef industry. The first of seven regions to be analyzed is Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. A survey and visits conducted throughout the region provided data on common production practices. From these data, representative ranch and feedyard operations were defined and simulated for the varying climate and soil conditions throughout the region using the Integrated Farm System Model. These simulations predicted environmental impacts of each operation including cradle-to-farm gate footprints for greenhouse gas emissions, fossil energy use, non-precipitation water use and reactive nitrogen loss. Ranch and feedyard operations were linked to form 28 representative production systems. A weighted average of the production systems was used to determine the environmental footprints for the region where weighting factors were developed based upon animal numbers reported in survey and agricultural statistics data. Along with the traditional beef production systems, systems including Holstein steers and cull cows from the dairy industry in the region were also modeled and included. The carbon footprint of all beef produced was estimated as 16.7 kg CO₂ equivalents (CO₂e)/kg carcass weight (CW) with the range in individual production systems being 13 to 25 kg CO₂e/kg CW. Energy use, water use, and reactive nitrogen loss were 50 MJ/kg CW, 2460 liters/kg CW and 128 g N/kg CW, respectively. The major portion of each footprint except water use was associated with the cow-calf phase; most of the water use was attributed to producing feed for the finishing phase. This information will be combined with processing, marketing and consumer data to complete a comprehensive life cycle assessment of the production and consumption of beef from the region in order to evaluate the sustainability of beef production in the United States.