Life Cycle Impact Assessment of the Year-round Grazing System for Fattening Japanese Brown Beef Steers

DOI Web Site

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • 褐毛和種去勢雄牛周年放牧肥育システムの環境影響評価
  • カツモウ ワシュ キョセイ オウシシュウネン ホウボク ヒイク システム ノ カンキョウ エイキョウ ヒョウカ

Search this article

Abstract

Beef production contributes to environmental problems, such as climate change, air pollution, and water pollution. The present study aimed to compare the environmental impact of the conventional fattening system for Japanese Brown beef steers (housed and fed large amounts of concentrate) with a year-round grazing system. We first evaluated the environmental impacts of the two beef fattening systems (year-round grazing and conventional) through life cycle assessment, then assessed the environmental impacts of the conventional cow-calf system. The impact of each system was determined regarding its potential contribution to global warming, acidification, and eutrophication, as well as its energy consumption. From these results and an evaluation of the carcass characteristics, we estimated and compared the environmental impacts per unit carcass weight of beef produced by the two fattening systems. The carcass weights were 403 kg (age at slaughter: 25.3 months) in the year-round grazing system and 465 kg (age at slaughter: 25.0 months) in the conventional system. The year-round grazing system led to lower environmental impacts per unit body weight gain of steers during fattening compared with the conventional system with reductions in the global warming, acidification and eutrophication potentials, and energy consumption of 22, 87, 81, and 57%, respectively. Unlike the conventional system, imported feed was scarcely used in the year-round grazing system. This led to a reduction in the environmental impacts associated with feed transportation, the major factor contributing to the reduction of all the impact categories we assessed. The impacts on global warming, acidification, and eutrophication potentials, and energy consumption per kg carcass weight of beef in the conventional system were 30.1 kg CO2eq., 326.7 g SO2eq., 38.0 g PO4eq., and 210.9 MJ, respectively, and in the year-round grazing system 27.8 kg CO2eq., 153.2 g SO2eq., 20.3 g PO4eq., and 134.2 MJ, respectively. Consequently, the year-round grazing system led to a reduction in the environmental impacts per unit carcass weight of beef compared with the conventional system, with reductions in global warming, acidification, and eutrophication potentials of 8, 53, and 47 %, respectively, and in energy consumption of 36%. We can therefore conclude that introducing year-round grazing into a conventional beef fattening system can mitigate the environmental impacts of Japanese beef production.

Journal

Related Projects

See more

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top