• True cost accounting

Assess costs from:

1. Animal production
   • Manure management
   • Transportation, processing and food preparation costs are typically not measured.
2. Feed production
3. Animal products
   • Health costs from eating
   • Waste

Environmental costs

• GHG emissions
  • Primarily through methane (CH₄) emissions from enteric fermentation (digestion in ruminants)
  • Methane and nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions resulting from manure management
  • Feed production
  • Agriculture is also a source of carbon dioxide emissions, most of which comes from the conversion of grassland to cropland and soil degradation associated with continuous crop production and high livestock stocking rates.
• Land use
  • Biodiversity loss
  • Counterfactual land use (i.e. we could reforest or solar panel agri land)
    • This can result in GHGs if we replace land with options that capture less carbon
• Air pollution:
  • In agriculture, ammonia (NH₃) comes almost entirely from nitrogen in Urea (urine) and manure (and from synthetic/organic fertilisers on fields).
  • Worse in Intensive systems
  • damages human health (cardiovascular and respiratory diseases)
  • biodiversity loss through soil and water acidification
  • Additionally, hydrogen sulphide, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter from intensive livestock systems. ChatGPT says this is minor
• Soil damage
  • Soil erosion, driven by practices such as tillage, soil compaction, and overgrazing by livestock, is a measurable environmental cost
  • soil acidification from the air pollution
• Water pollution
  • The leaching and run-off of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertiliser application and livestock manures can lead to eutrophication in surface and groundwater, rendering lakes and rivers uninhabitable for aquatic life.
    • The European Nitrogen Assessment, for example, shows that the negative costs to society from the excessive use of nitrogen fertiliser in food production are up to three times higher than the commercial benefits derived from such use by farmers.
  • Water acidification from the air pollution
  • herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides

Health costs

• CAWF NHS report MOC
• T2D
• Obesity
• Cancer
• CVD

Which are the biggest?

• the UN’s State of Food and Agriculture 2023 report found that at the global level, health costs tend to be larger
• Azarkamand et al., 2024 Break down the hidden costs from environmental harms and for beef, and they found that:

1. Climate change was the largest impact
2. Acidification was second
3. Fine dust PM2.5 was third
4. The fossil fuels used to produce the product were fourth
5. The rest were relatively minor, including: Land use, Water use, Photochemical ozone formation, Eutrophication of fresh water, Ecotoxicity of fresh water