Synergistic effects of complementary production systems help reduce livestock environmental burdens

Global demand for food and energy pushes the agrifood sector to increase production which, in turn, increases pressures on ecosystems. An integrated approach is essential to cope with agro-environmental challenges and ensure sustainable agricultural productions. The current study follows the principles of industrial ecology and explores potential greenhouse gas mitigation practices by considering multiple agricultural sectors as complementary industries. The focus of the study was the production of meat, considering the dairy and beef industries as complementary sectors. They were studied as an integrated system in order to evaluate how these two meat production systems can contribute at reducing environmental impacts and make agricultural productions more sustainable. We use Canada as an example because it has two very different meat production systems: Western Canada raise beef cattle quasi-exclusively and has relatively few dairy cattle; in contrast, Eastern Canada, has a balanced production of beef and dairy cattle (about 50/50). This situation provides an ideal opportunity to achieve the objective of this study. Calculations were based on the Unified Livestock Industry and Crop Emissions Estimation System (ULICEES) calculator. Our results show synergy between integrated beef and dairy systems in Eastern Canada resulted in a 22% lower carbon footprint (CF) of meat compared to the scenario where meat was only produced by the beef industry. A scenario where western Canada would have equal size dairy and beef populations indicated that western meat CFs would be 31% lower than its current levels. This study illustrates how complementary multi-product agricultural production systems acting in synergy can increase production efficiencies compared to specialized single-product systems. It shows that such production strategy represents one of the great opportunities to reduce the environ-mental impacts from agricultural production systems.