Where has Beef Sustainability been Grazing Lately and to What Pasture it Should Move?

Over the last four years I’ve been an active member and contributor to the Global Roundtable on Sustainable Beef, a multi-stakeholder organization formed in 2013 to define and lead the development of sustainable beef around the world. It’s formed by a multitude of regional and international players of the whole beef industry (from inputs to retailers), civil society and academia. When I joined it representing WWF, one of its founding members, the organization was still discussing the principles and criteria to define beef sustainability, the number of players involved was very limited and only Brazil had a national roundtable already formed, connected to the GRSB.

Every two years the GRSB organizes the Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, that is, among other important things, a moment for the organization to take stock of everything that happened, what worked and what is not working and reflect on what lies ahead. The one that happened this week in Kilkenny, Ireland was the third one and reckoned record participation: 244 people (18% producers) from over 25 different countries, not a small feat for a B to B meeting of a single sector.

It had field trips to farms, beef processing plants and to a research center in Ireland, all connected to the Irish Origin Green program managed by Board Bia. Throughout the visits, presentations and meetings during the conference we had the chance to learn a great deal about this one of a kind initiative and the results they are achieving so far. From the presentations and break out sessions we got to know where all the 8 different national roundtables are, including the newly formed European one, but also the plans of the upcoming ones like Southern Africa and Australia. We learned about the impacts they are already generating, their major initiatives, lessons learned, challenges faced, how they are engaging producers and what some of their members are doing to help advance the beef sustainability goals. I gladly had the chance to lead one of the breakout sessions, named Global Sustainability Impacts – A Multi Country Perspective, with panelists representing the Brazilian, Colombian and European roundtables. In the following paragraphs I try to summarize my major takeaways and learnings from the conference and from all the conversations and discussions I had the chance to participate.

First of all, it was impressive to see the advancements that some of the roundtables had in developing their indicators for beef sustainability, based on the principles and criteria of the GRSB. The US Roundtable have them done in recording timing and going through a review now based on more than 450 comments they got from public and have already some pilot projects getting implemented to test them. The Brazilian one developed an electronic platform for their indicators self-assessment and is now working to scale up its use from the current 400 sustainability assessments already done. The Canadian Roundtable moved really fast and not only have also hundreds of producers, processors and retailers using their indicators, they now have a third part verification and certification scheme for beef sustainability built on top of the CRSB framework and one company, McDonalds, just launched a hamburger at their restaurants in Canada produced with the certified beef.

Talking about McDonalds, we must need more companies leading the way and pushing for beef sustainability like they have. Since early on they made a very bold commitment to start buying beef from sustainability programs under the GRSB platform by 2016, what they achieved in Canada and Brazil, taking their suppliers along with them on that journey. Through collaboration and partnership with their suppliers and producers, the company also committed to a 31% reduction in emissions intensity (per metric ton of food and packaging) across their supply chain by 2030 from 2015 levels. Beef is an important part of that. More recently they announced an even broader commitment and ambitious goals for 2020: in each of their top 10 beef sourcing countries (the U.S., Australia, Germany, Brazil, Ireland, Canada, France, New Zealand, the U.K. and Poland – which collectively represent more than 85% of their global beef volumes), they will source at least a portion of their beef from GRSB aligned initiatives, helping the whole industry with knowledge and tools, promoting flagship farms, pioneering new practices and verifying that beef is coming only from zero deforestation farms. No other company so far came forward that way with such bold commitments nor is actively pushing and helping their supply chains in the implementation of such targets like McDonalds. Here’s definitely one area where we need more action from others.

Another important area for improvement is on the outcome-based metrics for sustainability. They are key because they are the only ones that truly measure the impacts of what has been done to the key things that life (including us) depend upon for our survival on this planet. They also make sense for the social license and long-term survival of the beef industry too as a growing number of people are blaming the beef industry for their increases, all for well-known reasons: GHG emissions, water use and land use (including its protection and/or conversion of natural habitats), just to mention 3. Action on Greenhouse gas emissions was listed by Rabobank as one of the key 5 issues shaping the long term outlook of beef. Definitely, Social and Economic metrics have to be added to those.

The roundtables so far developed meaningful indicators and/or metrics for its users and most of them are practice based. Don’t take me wrong, they represent a great progress and are very important to the users, but very few initiatives are at this point measuring or setting goals for the outcome-based ones. Here the Origin Green initiative was a great example showing that it can be done, not only for the whole country but for each individual participant. It was staggering to learn that more than 50,000 beef farms representing more than 70% of their production and 90% of their exports, already have them calculated, with their baseline and annual progress measured consistently. The measurements are done by a calculator operated by the program technicians via farm audits, who also offers recommendations to producers in how to reduce them on a continuous improvement base.

Another great initiative that proved beef can be produced reducing drastically its impacts (when done with sustainability practices!) was the Carbon Neutral Beef Initiative from Embrapa, Brazil. They developed and implemented in several farms a solution using the integration of timber, pastures intensification and/or crops that can not only drastically reduce the net GHG emissions but neutralized it or even turn it into negative. All of that measured with LCA’s and peer review published. Yes, you listened right: there is already carbon sink beef being produced! Do both initiatives have their impact measurements precisely calculated and easy to do? God, no, but they are a great start and for sure will be improved over time as more science and technology becomes available.

Science. Here’s another key area when it comes to the impact metrics where the GRSB should play an active role. There’s a lot of confusion, unknows and probably wrong information out there on the impacts of beef and how they are calculated and accounted for. During the conference we learned that IPCC just released a report asking governments to work towards reducing the consumption of meats as one of the key tactics to reduce climate change. But we also learned during the conference a study published in Nature demonstrating that IPCC overestimated the impact of the Methane gas, main gas today in the GHG emission calculations from beef and dairy cattle. There also a lot of unknows and misconceptions in the capacity of soils, grasses and other plants roots, associated with grazing, to capture and store carbon.

Another very interesting study, this one presented at the conference by one of its author, Dr. Michael Lee from Rothamsted Research and University of Bristol, used data from seven livestock production systems encompassing cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry to propose a novel framework to incorporate nutritional value of meat products into livestock LCAs using the Nutritional Index. A number of studies have examined environmental consequences of different food consumption patterns at the diet level; however, few have addressed nutritional variations of a single commodity attributable to production systems, leaving limited insight into how on‐farm practices can be improved to better balance environment and human nutrition. The results of quantitative case studies demonstrate that relative emissions intensities associated with different systems can be dramatically altered when the nutrient content of meat replaces the mass of meat as the functional unit, with cattle systems outperforming pig and poultry systems in some cases. This finding suggests that the performance of livestock systems should be evaluated under a whole supply chain approach.

One very important area of focus from now on is the scale up of the sustainability frameworks and initiatives, for those that are already up and running. But not just to prove, reward or show what the best performers are already doing, but primarily to bring the worst performers on board and to help them improve their practices, indicators and metrics so one day they can also reach the same level of the best performers. We can’t forget that the beef reputational risks are not coming from the best but rather from the worst performers. And we have to do it faster and more purposely. The good news is that we learned many lessons in how to make that happen:

• Documenting the business case/case studies for improvements in all regions and conditions. But most importantly put them into action with the worst performers, communicating them friendlier and using them more effectively in the engagement with the stakeholders we want to influence or change, like we saw the Red Tractor initiative doing in UK;
• Let producers tell producers. That’s why is so important to keep and even improve the level of engagement of producers in the roundtables, letting them own and propagate to their peers the sustainability message. Followed by technical and extensive services that really work, done by local people that have their trust and are knowledgeable of their realities, like Red Tractor did with the involvement of the local vets in the initiative to reduce the use of antibiotics;
• Add value to the producers, if possible upfront via the payment for quality improvements, for ecological services, improving their time off, making their life easier reducing the hassle in doing things and/or via long term contracts like we saw Moy Park doing with 1,600 producers in France in exchange of 15% total reduction in GHG’s by 2025.
• Bring along the allied industries. Not only to add more value to stakeholders but also to help reduce the transactional costs, push supply chains and improve the communication efforts. It was great to see the Leather industry present at the conference, forming their own roundtable connect to the GRSB and even projecting premium payments to the stakeholders that produce skins and leather with sustainability. Next it could be the pet food industry for example;
• Don’t patronize the producers. Make sure you are not asking something impossible or unprofitable to producers and that you have something to offer in exchange that would be valuable to her/him before engaging;
• Big Data and Traceability Technology. Important to reduce transactions and make life easier to stakeholders, if possible offering other benefits in exchange for the data. It should also give back information that is useful for decision making in exchange. Focus can be on the new generation, especially of producers. We had two good examples at the conference of this, one from Board Bia on the tool the have to calculate the environmental impacts that also provides recommendations back to the producers in how to make things better. The second one is from Max Makuvise, Chief Executive Officer of the Makera Cattle Company in Zimbabwe, where they developed a very slick traceability system for small holders using a cell phone app and RFID tags connected to the bank financial system so famers can use their cattle as collaterals to access finance for improving the sustainability of their production systems.
• Outsourcing. Even with the premiums, economic benefits demonstrated, etc, etc, many producers will not move and will always have the bad (and often illegal) players to sell to. In many situations it’s a case of time and focus availability or even a lifestyle decision. For those cases, offering a solution that would outsource the implementation of the sustainability package with low risk and no upfront costs (profit sharing or payment for outcomes, for example) could be a solution. Good examples of that would be the Novo Campo project or the Artificial Insemination Outsourcing Model, both from Brazil;
• Pride and social license. Important also to celebrate successes and offer recognition and prizes to producers and companies doing the right things.

I’m sure that are many other important things that I’m missing, that my brain and notes were not efficient in capturing. If you were there and have anything else to add or contribute to this report, please let me know.

I would like to finish thanking everyone that made this amazing conference possible, the super hard-working GRSB staff, all the participants that brought and shared their experiences and learnings from all over the world, the WWF teams from several different countries that have been contributing and in many cases leading on many of these fronts and my fellow panelists that made my life super easy. Thank you all and let’s continue our work, working even harder and focused on the learning we got from this conference in order to make beef environmentally friend, socially responsible and economically viable.