As part of ongoing work to harmonise the UK’s leading carbon calculators, Agrecalc has worked in partnership with Cool Farm Alliance and Farm Carbon Toolkit to develop a white paper which details new approaches for industry-wide modelling of the embedded emissions of purchased livestock.
This will support further development of even more accurate and consistent carbon footprints for the livestock sector, allowing for fairer comparisons between breeder/finishers and finisher systems.
The emissions created through the rearing of livestock includes the methane the animals produce as they digest their feed, the nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide produced from growing feeds for them, and the methane and nitrous oxide released during manure management. Currently, Agrecalc accounts for these emissions when they occur on farm. However, historically it has not accounted for the emissions produced rearing animals purchased by a farm.
Accounting for the embedded emissions from rearing purchased livestock is important. It allows for a fairer comparison between farms which breed their own replacements and farms which finish animals they buy in. It also means that any reported product emissions are more accurate, properly accounting for the full cradle-to-gate production process.
It is for these reasons that many standards call for the inclusion of all emissions from producing purchased goods and services in a carbon footprint (e.g. GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard, IDF Carbon Footprinting Standard). Despite the requirements of carbon standards, most farm-level footprinting tools have excluded embedded emissions from purchased livestock from their calculations. This is partly because there has not been an agreed-on approach for including these emissions.
Our white paper addresses this gap, outlining three approaches which account for embedded emissions from livestock in farm-level tools. Outwith our harmonisation partners, this work was also done in consultation with researchers from the FAO (Food & Agriculture Organisation), who reviewed the suggested approaches and helped to identify datasets that could be used to calculate emission factors.
We are now working on the application of this paper to our own model. As we currently report emissions intensity on net output, implementing embedded emissions would require changing to reporting on gross output. Look out for future announcements as this develops and our implementation is refined.
