Time for action: the carbon footprint of the hidden soy in pet food
A deep dive into granular data can accelerate understanding of the impacts of soy in animal feed, which can have an outsized effect on the carbon footprint of 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.
If that’s not enough to inspire action, pet food manufacturers have extra incentives to better understand their ties to land conversion:
- A prerequisite to tracking progress on sustainability commitments is having sufficient insight into the supply chain to measure the effect of various interventions
- Fast-evolving policies such as the EU Deforestation Regulation and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive require traceability, transparency and compliance
- Industry collaboration is needed to foster conditions for success in addressing shared challenges such as land conversion
Unravelling the value chain
Swiss sustainability consultancy AdAstra, while supporting a leading food manufacturer with a stake in European poultry, has pioneered a multifaceted solution to calculate the carbon footprint of the soy embedded in its client’s chicken products. The case study used trade statistics and subnational, high-resolution data on land conversion to unravel the impact of soy, highlighting the implications for poultry and by extension for the pet food industry.
Using a custom international trading model, it worked backwards, tracing the origins of the soy from slaughterhouse locations in Europe to the exporting countries, such as Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. AdAstra then used subnational trade data from transparency initiative Trase to determine the jurisdictions within each country that likely supplied the soy.
Using its technology called Orbae, AdAstra calculated the greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion for soy in each subnational jurisdiction. Working at a resolution of 30 meters, Orbae combines data on agricultural crops and land conversion derived from satellite imagery, then calculates the carbon footprint for any level of traceability, whether a farm, municipality, state or country.
The findings
Replacing the coarse data with the refined impact factors from Orbae resulted in a 35% decrease in the overall carbon footprint of the client’s chicken. While this project resulted in a lower product footprint, the opposite can be equally true. Greater granularity may reveal previously unknown hotspots.
However, this should not deter companies from taking responsibility for their contribution to land conversion. Knowledge is power when it comes to understanding risks and engaging with suppliers.
Subnational origin
With the improved granularity, AdAstra found that land conversion emissions for soy vary widely within exporting countries. In Brazil, it observed footprints ranging from 100 kg CO2-equivalent per metric ton of soy to a staggering 18,000 kg CO2-equivalent depending on the municipality.
Importing location
Where the animal is raised influences the footprint of the final product, as different European countries import unique mixes of soy from exporting countries. For instance, the sourcing patterns of soy imported to Germany look different from those of Spain, and so come with a different carbon footprint. That footprint gets passed along to the next links in the value chain: the feed, and in the case of AdAstra’s client, the chicken.
Land conversion
While forests tend to take the spotlight, soy expansion can also be a driver of land conversion of other important natural ecosystems, such as savannas and wetlands. In Brazil, AdAstra found that such land conversion makes up a third of the climate impacts of the soy value chain. Despite being vital carbon sinks, natural ecosystems beyond forest have been largely overlooked, but require consideration.
Putting insights to work
The insights from this case study transcend soy, offering a blueprint for applying the same methodology to other high-risk commodities used in animal feed, such as corn, rice and palm.
Pet food manufacturers can leverage this granular data to enhance visibility into their impacts, make informed decisions about how to reduce them, manage their risks and actively contribute towards the imperative goal of ending land conversion and restoring nature.
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