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Beef purchasing in food service (World Resources Institute)

Here is a summary of the report.

Executive Summary

Beef production is a leading driver of environmental impacts from agriculture. This report explores best practices for lower-emissions beef production in North America and Europe, highlighting opportunities and challenges for food purchasing organizations looking to reduce their beef emissions while balancing other sustainability goals.

HIGHLIGHTS

Introduction and context
Beef and other ruminant meats generally have the highest environmental impacts of protein-rich foods across most environmental metrics, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land use, and water pollution per unit of protein (Poore and Nemecek 2018).¹ Beef production is also the leading driver of recent tropical deforestation globally (Pendrill et al. 2019). While reducing total volumes of beef purchased is essential to meeting climate commitments, food purchasing organizations may also prioritize reducing emissions per unit of beef for their remaining beef purchases.

About this report
This research examines the most effective ways that food purchasing organizations in North America and Europe can reduce the emissions associated with their beef supply chain while accounting for their other environmental, animal welfare, and social goals. It aims to support food service companies, retailers, distributors, and other institutions that purchase food (referred to as “food purchasing organizations” for simplicity). Combining insights from academic research and expert interviews, we explore the best practices for lower-emissions beef production in North America and Europe, along with practical opportunities and challenges for sourcing lower-emissions beef.

Key findings
The potential to reduce the climate impacts of beef production depends heavily on how much land is required to raise the animals and grow animal feed. Typically, most GHG assessments track the emissions from agricultural production, including methane and nitrous oxide emissions from enteric fermentation, feed production, and manure management. In some cases, the emissions from processing, transportation, and other losses are added to the on-farm emissions to calculate total agricultural supply chain emissions. However, the climate impacts of agricultural land occupation—measured in carbon opportunity cost, or the carbon losses from plants and soils that occur when natural ecosystems are converted to agriculture—are increasingly recognized, to account for the fact that land that is used for cropland or pastureland could otherwise be used to sequester carbon (Hayek et al. 2021; Blaustein-Rejto et al. 2023). Carbon opportunity cost more fully measures emissions associated with land occupation compared to other metrics such as statistical or direct land use change (Waite et al. 2019).²

On average globally, for every unit of beef produced, the carbon opportunity cost amounts to over four times the carbon dioxide equivalent of emissions from activities in the agricultural supply chain (Searchinger et al. 2018).³ Therefore, organizations setting targets to reduce total carbon costs associated with their food purchasing (the aggregate of agricultural supply chain emissions plus carbon opportunity cost) will also need to measure and evaluate the impact of practices to reduce agricultural land occupation. The total carbon cost of beef production is generally lowest in systems that take less time for cattle to reach slaughter weight and that use less land.

In conventional beef production systems, efficiency⁴ has been increasing for decades, and there are still opportunities to further lower production emissions per unit of meat (Beauchemin et al. 2020). These include continued efficiency gains, grazing optimization, improved disease management, feed additives, and changes in animal breeding and genetics (Beauchemin et al. 2020; Blaustein-Rejto et al. 2021). Previous research found that all existing and potential mitigation strategies combined could reduce production emissions in the United States (US) per kilogram of beef by an estimated 48 percent by 2030 (Blaustein-Rejto et al. 2021), primarily through decreasing methane emissions from enteric fermentation, producing feed additives with low-carbon electricity, and increasing carbon sequestration on pastureland and feed cropland.

While the strategies above could reduce a substantial portion of production emissions, they would lead to only minimal reductions in land occupation. Because the climate impacts of agricultural land occupation are so significant, once the carbon opportunity cost is added to the total agricultural supply chain emissions, implementing all existing and potential mitigation technologies analyzed by Blaustein- Rejto et al. (2021) would reduce US beef’s total carbon costs per kilogram by only 18 percent combined.

Most existing third-party certification schemes identify beef from alternative production systems, such as organic or grass-fed beef systems, which focus on improving animal welfare, reducing antibiotic use, and improving soil health and on-farm biodiversity. Organic and grass-fed beef production systems offer improved benefits for these goals; at the same time, they often come with higher production emissions and land occupation relative to conventional production (Waite et al. 2024). For example, across 18 paired comparisons between conventional and alternative production systems, the median total carbon costs of grass-finished beef per kilogram were over double those of feedlot-finished beef, while organic production systems were 28 percent higher (Waite et al. 2024).

That said, emissions and other sustainability metrics could theoretically be improved across both conventional and alternative systems. For example, grazing practices could be optimized in conventional beef production chains to improve carbon sequestration and soil health prior to feedlot finishing (Whitt and Wallander 2022). Grass-finishing or organic operations could implement practices to improve yields and reduce animal disease, which could lower land occupation and total carbon costs.

Food purchasing organizations face challenges in reducing beef supply chain emissions due to low supply chain transparency and a lack of market-ready, traceable low-emissions options. There is a distinct mismatch between the indicators and practices that most heavily influence emissions according to academic research and the information that US beef suppliers and purchasers currently have available to them. Some third-party certifications are emerging in the US to identify beef produced with practices that cause lower net GHG emissions than conventionally produced beef, but there is insufficient publicly available information to verify these claims at this time.

Conclusion and recommendations
Until more supply chain transparency and mitigation strategies become available, we recommend food purchasing organizations consider the following guidelines to increase their beef supply chain sustainability, reduce GHG emissions associated with beef production, and minimize trade-offs where possible:

  1. How much beef? Serve less. Reducing per capita beef consumption in high-consuming regions of the world is essential to meeting climate targets, and serving less beef is a critical step for food purchasing organizations working to reduce their scope 3 emissions. Food purchasing organizations can help enable and encourage consumers to select lower-carbon, plant-rich menu items.
  2. How is beef produced? Identify sourcing priorities, and serve even less beef if needed to address multiple sustainability commitments. Food purchasing organizations may wish to source a higher share of grass-fed or organic beef to meet animal welfare, antibiotic use, or other sustainable sourcing commitments. To meet climate commitments while doing so, they may need to source even less beef to offset the increased emissions from those alternative systems. We provide scenarios quantifying how much less beef to source to meet multiple sustainability priorities at once.
  3. How to support the adoption of lower-emitting practices? Consider directly engaging existing producers and suppliers to adopt practices that help reduce emissions. Food purchasing organizations may pursue projects that fund farmers to adopt mitigation practices, thus helping drive the market for lower-emissions beef production.

While it may not be possible for food purchasing organizations to immediately and verifiably reduce beef production emissions in their supply chains, they can help drive the creation of a market for lower-emissions and more sustainable beef. Food purchasing organizations can use this opportunity to demonstrate their leadership in climate mitigation and responsible sourcing by continuing to demand increased transparency about beef production practices and exploring opportunities to directly support producers in adopting new practices to reduce emissions and improve other sustainability metrics. Pairing improved production practices with lower beef purchases may help offset associated cost increases and meet multiple sustainability priorities at once. Additionally, while emerging solutions like certification labels and direct funding programs are in development, scaling them will require stronger market signals, unified buyer expectations, and government support to incentivize adoption and improve data access.