Greenhouse gas emissions and feed-food competition on Swiss dairy farms

Ineichen Colantuoni, Sebastian Manuel; Elmiger, Noëmi Katharina; Flachsmann, Tiziano; Grenz, Jan; Reidy, Beat (May 2024). Greenhouse gas emissions and feed-food competition on Swiss dairy farms In: 30th General Meeting of the European Grassland Federation. Utrecht: European Grassland Federation

Text Ineichen_et_al_2024-EGF.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (270kB) | Request a copy

Negative environmental impacts from livestock need to be reduced. However, animal-sourced proteins will remain important for global food supply, as animals are able to convert biomass not suitable for human consumption to high value proteins. Animals compete directly with human food supply when fed human-edible feedstuffs. Feeding cows with concentrated feeds may decrease GHG-intensity; however, it likely increases feed-food competition. To investigate these conflicts of interest, we assessed GHG emissions and the human edible protein conversion ratio (edible protein in feeds/edible protein in animal products, ePCR) of 87 Swiss dairy cow farms. The GHG emission intensity was 0.70-1.21 kg CO 2 eq (kg energy corrected milk)-1. The ePCR ranged from 0.04 to 1.14. Correlation between GHG-intensity and ePCR was low, implying that low GHG-intensity does not contradict low feed-food competition. Human-edible protein production per kg of CO 2 eq ranged from-4.6 to 32.5 g CP. As a novel approach, we propose to calculate environmental footprints based on net human edible protein supply.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL > Agriculture School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences HAFL > Agriculture > Grasslands and Ruminant Production Systems
Name:	Ineichen Colantuoni, Sebastian Manuel0000-0002-8461-9825; Elmiger, Noëmi Katharina; Flachsmann, Tiziano; Grenz, Jan and Reidy, Beat0000-0002-8619-0209
Subjects:	S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General) S Agriculture > SB Plant culture S Agriculture > SF Animal culture
ISBN:	978-90-903-8494-8 /
Publisher:	European Grassland Federation
Language:	English
Submitter:	Sebastian Manuel Ineichen Colantuoni
Date Deposited:	20 Aug 2024 11:06
Last Modified:	20 Aug 2024 11:06
Related URLs:	https://www.europeangrassland.org/filead...
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Net human food supply Environmental footprint Human edible feed conversion ratio
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.22159
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/22159