Miljøprojekt, 1028 – Sammenligning af miljøpåvirkningen af konkurrerende jordbrugsprodukter

Sammenligning af miljøpåvirkningen af konkurrerende jordbrugsprodukter

Summary and conclusions

Competitive Danish agricultural products

Danish pork and milk products have a good vantage point for competing with similar foreign products when environment is on the agenda as a sales argument. However, it is still necessary for the producers to focus on further improvements, especially with respect to nitrogen management, for both pigs and milking cows.

The difference between the countries involved is concentrated on a few important environmental aspects. For pork, focus is on ammonia emissions and area use for fodder production, while for milk products, nitrogen emissions to water and methane emissions to air are of special importance. When environmental profiles for pork and milk (i.e. information on environmental impacts per kg pork / per litre milk) are desired for use in marketing, it is therefore possible to concentrate the environmental information on these few decisive aspects.

These are some of the key conclusions from the project ”Comparison of the environmental impact of competing agricultural products” funded by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency under its Programme for Cleaner Products.

Background and objectives

The purpose of the project is to assess the environmental impacts from Danish pork and milk products in a life cycle perspective, in comparison with competing products, and, on this basis, to identify and prioritise the areas where the Danish environmental performance can be improved, and to assess how Danish enterprises can utilize this knowledge on the international marketplace.

The investigation

Lifecycle based environmental data was collected from pig production and milk production from different countries and farm types, selected to represent important competitors for the Danish producers.

On the basis of this data, the most important differences in environmental performance between countries and farm types were identified and used to set up comparable production models. The environmental impacts were then assessed with the most recent version of the Danish lifecycle impact assessment method, EDIP2003 (Hauschild & Potting 2004). Specific attention was given to the importance of the sensitivity of local ecosystems to nitrogen emissions from the pig farms.

Finally, interviews were carried out to determine how information on the environmental profile of products can best be utilised by the Danish producers of pork and milk products.

Differences identified between competing productions

Data on production and environmental exchanges in a lifecycle perspective was used to compare the Danish production of pork with the most competitive part of the production in the Netherlands, Spain, USA and Brazil. Data has been collected by local consultants. The project found the documentation to be adequate to point out the following differences founded on technological, physical geographical or administrative conditions, i.e. differences that cannot be ascribed to mere coincidence:

The fodder composition
The number of piglets per year-sow
Manure management and the consequent coefficients for ammonia emissions
Utilization efficiency of the manure in plant growth

For the production of milk, the comparison was made between products from representative farms within three different farm types that contribute significant shares of the European milk production, and that can compete with Danish milk production in the EU and on overseas markets today and in the future. The most important difference between the farm types turned out to be in the efficiency of their nutrient turnover, especially:

The utilization rate of fodder
The utilization rate of manure in the field in combination with artificial fertiliser.

For both the pig production and the milk production, the collected data were used as input to standardised production models, selected to create a uniform foundation for the comparison, so that the results are not influenced by random effects, such as differences in coefficients used in data collection.

For the individual environmental impact categories the differences are:

Global warming: There are no major differences between the analysed countries and farm types. A large part of the contribution comes from methane emissions. However, on the level of single farms, there may still be significant differences which are not expressed at the level of farm types, where standard coefficients are applied. Therefore, there is still ample improvement opportunities, e.g. in collecting methane from manure storage.

Acidification: It is mainly ammonia from livestock production itself that contributes to the acidification potential. The differences are particularly large between the pig producers in the different countries.

Eutrophication: Ammonia emissions also contribute significantly to eutrophication, which is else dominated by nitrate emissions. It is for this impact category that the largest differences are found between the analysed countries and farm types.

Nature occupation: For the pig producers, soybean production contributes with approximately half of the total nature occupation. For the milk producers, nature occupation is not only a negative concept, since part of the production contributes to maintaining valuable semi-natural areas in the form of meadows and dry grasslands.

Main conclusions

The Danish pig producers compare well to their foreign competitors in a lifecycle perspective of important environmental impacts such as global warming, acidification and eutrophication. The only exception is the impact category ”nature occupation”, especially due to the lower yields per area of barley and wheat – the main energy fodder for Danish pigs, compared to maize, which is the main energy source in the fodder used in the USA and in Brazil.

Furthermore, when taking into account that local environments can have different sensitivities towards the emissions they receive, which in the EDIP2003-method is possible for the European producers, it turns out that the Danish pork contributes more to acidification than the Spanish production, and that there is no longer a significant difference between the Danish and Dutch contributions to eutrophication. This is due to the lower sensitivity of the Dutch environment with respect to nutrient emissions, compared to the Danish environment, and that the Spanish environment is much less sensitive to acidification than is the Danish. This implies that if the products compete on their impacts on the local environments, Danish emissions – especially those of ammonia – need to be lower than for the competing countries that have a less sensitive environment.

For milk production, the difference between the farm types is especially noticeable for the potential nitrate leaching. In the comparison, the Danish farms with a mixed crop rotation contribute more to the eutrophication potential than do farms with moderate or low intensity on permanent grass. On the Danish farms, an improvement is particularly called for with respect to the utilisation of the nitrogen liberated after ploughing of grass fields.

More simple environmental communication could be achieved by limiting it to the issues that cause the most important environmental impacts and the most important differences, i.e. information relating to pork:

ammonia emissions
the area use for fodder production

and for milk:

nitrate emissions
methane emissions

Thus, a value for each of these issues would be sufficient to communicate a relevant environmental profile for these products.

Obviously, it is also for these issues that the most important improvement potentials can be found.

It is especially the markets in Japan, England, Germany and Sweden that show an interest in environmental issues. However, the producers' professional handling of environmental issues is generally only seen as an implicit expectation from the customers (the supermarket chains), and is therefore not expected to be used actively as a separate marketing parameter.

Knowledge on the environmental profile of Danish products should therefore primarily be seen as a necessary preparedness, enabling Danish enterprises to inform professionally and on an objective basis, when environmental issues are raised by customers or competitors. For pork, Japan and the USA can be exceptions from this rule, since ”Danish” is an important brand here, which is backed up by good ”stories” about the Danish production.