Life Cycle Environmental Impacts of Alternative Beef Production Systems in the Northeastern U.S.

The large-scale ecological impacts of cattle production are coupled with increasing global demand for beef. Innovative strategies are urgently needed to achieve sustainability. Much of the recent research in this area has been productivity-oriented, primarily focusing on technology use to increase efficiency and reduce environmental burdens. While increasing efficiency is important, it may not be sufficient for sustainability; transformative strategies may be needed. In the Northeastern U.S., the dairy sector may provide beef at a substantially lower environmental cost due to multi-functionality (i.e., milk and meat outputs).  Another system, grass-fed beef, is growing in popularity among regional consumers as a more sustainable and healthier alternative to conventionally produced beef. Research is needed to better understand the environmental impacts and potential food security contributions of these alternative systems. We analyze two regional production strategies in the Northeastern U.S.: grass-fed beef produced with management intensive grazing (MIG) and dairy beef. We use cradle-to-farm gate, ISO-compliant life cycle assessment (LCA). Our innovative approach adapts and applies a herd-level, life cycle livestock feed requirements within LCA. We parameterize this publicly available model with region-specific data and extend it beyond land use to calculate herd emissions to soil, water and air. In addition to normalizing results by mass carcass weight, we normalize by edible protein and energy content to reflect the primary function of the system as providing nutrition. Our findings add further nuance to discussions about increasing sustainability of beef systems. We illustrate tradeoffs between intensive and extensive systems and the impact of functional unit choice on outcomes. Our estimated differences in land requirements do not, however, account for the potential land use inefficiency from a food security perspective of producing concentrate feed instead of human food on prime agricultural land. Future research should explore these tradeoffs to better inform consumers and policy makers.