Time for action: the carbon footprint of the hidden soy in pet food

Soy can significantly shape the carbon footprint of food products, including pet food made from animal by-products, as soy is a cornerstone of feed eaten by chickens, swine and other livestock. How much it influences this impact hinges on where the animal that eats the soy was raised, where the crop was cultivated and whether the land it was grown on has recently been converted to agriculture.

Unique challenges

The complexity of the pet food value chain poses unique challenges to accurately assessing a product’s carbon footprint. A manufacturer must identify the origins of the animal by-products used in the pet food, where the animals were farmed, what they were fed and where the ingredients in their feed came from.

While information about the origin of by-products is often within reach of manufacturers via their suppliers (albeit generally not without obstacles), the origins of feed ingredients are likely to be more obscure. This is as true for grains such as corn and wheat as it is for soy.

Then, even if the ingredient can be traced back to its country of origin, the data on carbon emissions from land conversion has historically been too coarse to support strategic decision-making on environmental risks.

A puzzle worth solving

The expansion of soy production to feed livestock is a known driver of deforestation and other types of land conversion, with 40% of the world’s arable land used to grow feed, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. For poultry, 40 to 70% of its climate impacts come from land conversion alone, largely due to the soy they’re fed. It is widely accepted that to minimize global warming, we need to stop converting land and start restoring it within the next 6 years.