The Role of Pigs in the Carbon Footprint of Red Meat in Canada

Global livestock production is a major driver of climate change. Lumping beef and pork together as red meat masks important differences in their carbon footprints, land uses, and social status. These two red meat choices in Canada were compared by using a meta-model of the Unified Livestock Industry and Crop Emissions Estimation System (ULICEES). ULICEES calculated fossil CO2, N2O and CH4 emissions for beef, dairy, pork, poultry, and sheep production in Canada, based on both the livestock and their supporting land base in 2001. The dynamic drivers of the meta-model were crop yields, breeding female populations, tillage practices, nitrogen fertilizer use, and the crop complex of each livestock industry. When the potential carbon sequestration in the land growing harvested perennial forage is credited to beef production, the CO2e emissions offset does not reduce the carbon footprint of beef enough to match the lower carbon footprint of pork. Most of the land required to grow hay for beef would not be needed to feed a protein-equivalent pig population. In a hypothetical conversion of all beef production to pork production for 2021, 4.5 Mha of land under perennial forage was freed and 10.0 MtCO2e per year was mitigated when that area was re-cultivated for annual crops—a GHG mitigation equal to 12% of the GHG emissions budget of Canadian agriculture. Leaving that area under a perennial ground cover mitigated 19.8 MtCO2e per year, the equivalent of 23% of the sector’s GHG emissions budget.