Swap Out Beef or Swap for Beef Sustainability?
I started this article by writing a comment to Zahra Hirji, a journalist from Bloomberg, reflecting on her report One Simple Change to Reduce Your Climate Impact? Swap Out Beef , but noticed I had more to say than just the 300 characters available in the comments section of Linkedin.
The good news Zahra Hirji, is that you and all the beef lovers around the world will be able to continue eating beef! Obviously, as part of a balanced diet together with plenty of vegetables, fruits and good carbs. In your report, you only briefly mentioned a few efforts that the industry is taking to reduce the carbon footprint of beef, but there are way more than what meets the eye.
First of all, we should stop using footprints′ global averages to judge the beef sector. There are a lot of peer review studies, already available, showing a huge variation in the beef footprints per country, but most importantly, per farm, up to 50 times. And it varies depending of the animals diets, levels of productivity and efficiency, feed additives given, grazing methods used, manure management systems, levels of land conversion and many others. The FAO LEAP effort clearly demonstrated that. So it′s not a black-and-white issue. For example, beef production in the USA, including the production of animal feed, is responsible for only 3.7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, versus over 20% in some other countries.
Secondly, the beef industry, across the board, is taking huge efforts to measure, report and reduce these footprints. There are many multi-stakeholder initiatives, connected to the global and national beef sustainability roundtables, like the USRSB , just to mention one of them, and also company specific initiatives focused on achieving exactly that. Most all the major beef meatpackers (Cargill, Tyson, JBS, Marfrig, Minerva, etc) and beef products′ sellers (Walmart, McDonalds, Yum, Costco, Ahold, Tesco, Cassino, etc) have made SBTi commitments to not only reduce year on year their GHG emissions, but some even to become carbon net zero in the next decades, including their scope 3 emissions (the GHG footprint coming from their suppliers, beef producers). And they are already taking bold actions to achieve that, working along side with ranchers, feedlots and their associations, input suppliers (like the company I work for, dsm-firmenich Animal Nutrition & Health , who is very active in this space), universities, consultants (all the major ones like Deloitte, BCG, EY are involved, but also many local and smaller ones), NGOs (like WWF, TNC, NWF, Ducks Unlimited, etc) and innovators. Banks like Rabobank, HSBC, IFC, IDB and Santander, also impacted by beef in their scope 3, are providing green loans to finance those actions or even helping their customers on the ground in implementing sustainability solutions. New entrepreneurial initiatives, like Sustell, Athian, Regrow, Agoro, Truterra, Indigo, Bayer Carbon Program and others were born to measure, report and/or validate in a credible way those reductions on the ground but also the carbon captured by the farms′soils that are producing the feed and the animals, a figure that, until now, have not been considered in most of the beef GHG footprinting accounting. They also allow for value to be created and shared with feed and animal producers that are doing the right thing at their farms to reduce the beef and other ag footprints.
Talking about feed, less than 10% of beef lifetime diets are made of grains. 90% of their diets are made of grass/forage and agriculture residues, by-products that would be wasted if not for the ruminants that can digest them. Grazing, responsible for over 80% of the beef weight produced in the world, is the only economic, and therefore sustainable way, to keep grasslands intact and avoid their conversion to crops or to allow for the production of food in marginal lands not suitable for agriculture. Cattle, in those cases, are mimicking of what bison and other herbivores used to do, fertilizing the soil, stimulating the growth of the grasses (even with their hoofs, acting as aerators), supporting the life of a myriad of insects and their respective food chains (literally with their blood and tears, but also with their rich manure). It has been the first regenerative agriculture activity implemented at scale, long before the term was even coined! That′s the case of the northern great plains of the US or the Pampas region of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Grasslands, normally intermediated by bushlands, trees, parcels of forest, wetlands, etc, are home to important biodiversity, integrated to the livestock rooming them. They are home to birds, all kinds of insects, amphibies, reptiles and other mamifers. If you had already the chance to be in a beef ranch in contrast to a grain farm, you know what I′m talking about. I′m sharing a small sample of beef farms photos in this article, all taken by myself, while visiting customers and partners across the world. So the climate change issue should not be looked in isolation, but in a holistic way with the other environmental footprints, like biodiversity.
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My last argument is concerning the promoted individual shift away from beef consumption, instead of shifting it to better sources, brands and producers investing and/or already delivering on beef sustainability. First of all, a reduction in consumption in one or more countries may not lead to a reduction in production. In fact, large beef producers like US, Brazil and Australia already experienced a substantial reduction in beef consumption per capita in the last decades, mostly replaced by chicken meat. But their total beef production grew, mostly fed by exports. As well pointed out in your article Zahra, there is a growing demand for beef in Asia, but also in Middle East and Africa, and they would welcome with open arms a reduction in consumption in the western world, as more beef would become available to them. And probably cheaper but also with another negative consequence, now to the planet, as they normally have a way lower bar for sustainability.
So, in swapping out beef from your plate, you may be only shifting the problem to another plate and not really helping solve the global warming problem as planned. Instead, we should swap the consumption to beef produced in a more sustainable way, to support and promote the players and the efforts focused on doing the right thing. Just by voting with our wallets, or credit cards, we can make a huge difference. There are already beef products on the shelves of supermarkets or in restaurants around the world with verified/certified sustainability claims, even some that are already certified net zero. But I have to agree that′s not the norm yet, and it will take sometime until the sustainability initiatives become fully reflected in all the beef products we consume, as this is a long and laborious journey for the industry, not an easy and short destination. In that case, we should support the companies and brands that are trying to do the right thing and, instead of not buying anymore their beef products, double down on buying exclusively from them. For your reference, please find a non-extensive list of linked beef sustainability initiatives by the end of this article.
To end, I just would like to say that I know personally many of the people behind these initiatives and their brands, and they are good, hard working and very motivated people, truly concerned in making beef sustainability real. And they are facing an uphill battle, even internally in their organizations in many cases, trying to convince their pears, partners and suppliers to focus on sustainability, to start measuring the environmental footprints and to include new practices or to change existing ones that have been around for decades. And they need an economic case to support all that. So, no less, but more people buying their products, investing and supporting their initiatives instead of swapping them out. Think about it!
List of a few existing beef initiatives in sustainability (non extensive and only focused on a few examples). Search for other initiatives in your region and support them, their brands and producers. A good place to start is at the national beef sustainability roundtables (you can find the national roundtables complete list at the GRSB site).
What a great article Carlos! And pictures. You are a global diplomat for beef sustainability. I so appreciate the kind tone.
Graduate Research Assistant in methane emissions and carbon sequestration. B2B Content Marketer | Copywriter | SEO Specialist. Passionate about tech companies with a special interest in AgTech and GreenTech
8 个月I love your writeup. I have made lots of arguments in physical sustainability events where many of these plant-based or lab-grown meat producer make claims that simply ditching beef production and consumption will magically make our world free of greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, whenever I asked for their own production emissions, especially from CO2, many of them don't have the answer. Most of them forget the role of cattle production on sustaining landscape, the effects of grazing on carbon sequestration and how cattle convert wastes to protein sources. It's more like saying we need to ban airplane and replace it with cycling because the latter has zero emission. It just won't work. The focus should be on how to make cattle production sustainable, which many of us are already leading the initiatives rather than "swap out beef."
AgTech | FinTech | Product Leader | Global GTM Roadmapping & Strategies | Regulatory
9 个月Carlos, great job! This is the path forward for global food needs and the needs of the planet.
Senior Marketer | Strategy | Brand | Digital | Communications | Campaigns
9 个月Couldn’t agree more Carlos M. Saviani - sometimes it’s “too hard” to fact find and be informed. Eat ?? beef, 1 protein, no test tube emulsions synthesised in a lab. Like everything we consume, choose wisely. Follow your brands of choice, understand thier supply chain, be engaged with food provenance, understand thier quality certifications and attributes; producers of all food go to extensive measures to be transparent and to attain these accolades. Swap out beef? For a more carbon negative factory produced artificially manufactured concept that resembles healthy food on a plate? That’s not good news for the world.
Global Head Sustainable Business Development Wholesale & Rural, Rabobank
9 个月Great article, Carlos.