LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 7B: BEEF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
(Section 2.4), the cropland, infrastructure and grazing land of suitability class 1 (highly productive grazing
land) land use classes were deemed to be fully occupied (i.e. effectively unavailable for other productive
uses). In contrast, the forestry and grazing lands of poorer suitability were deemed to be multiple-use and
occupied in proportion to the fraction of NPP0 appropriated. As such, humanity’s land use footprint was assessed
at 3.92E+13 m 2 .yr-e, or 6.40E+03 m 2 .yr-e per inhabitant, in the year 2000 (Table 2). To avoid possible
misunderstanding, it is stressed that our land use footprint is a measure of land occupation, not human
appropriation of net primary production.
Table 2. Normalisation factors used in this study.
Indicator Unit Factor Year Reference
Carbon footprint kg CO2-e person -1 yr -1 6.83E+03 2000 Sleeswijk et al., 2008
Water footprint L H2O-e person -1 yr -1 6.73E+05 1995 Ridoutt and Pfister, 2010b
Land use footprint m 2 .yr-e person -1 yr -1 6.40E+03 2000 Haberl et al., 2007; Erb et al., 2007
3. Results
3.1. Land use inventory results
The life cycle (cradle to farm gate) agricultural land use associated with the six beef cattle production systems
varied from 64.0 to 121.1 m 2 .yr/kg LW. However, this land use cannot be directly compared as the
proportions of unimproved and improved pasture and cropland varied (Table 3). The land use quality, as
described by the net primary productivity of potential biomass, also varied, from a high of 944 g C.m 2 .yr -1
(high rainfall coastal cropland) to a low of 355 g C.m 2 .yr -1 (semi-arid unimproved pastureland).
Table 3. Land use inventory results (m 2 .yr per kg live weight at farm gate) for 6 diverse beef cattle production
systems in southern Australia.
JOS EUP IGF NGF YG YB
Pasture-unimproved 93.6 0 77.3 69.2 0 0
Pasture-improved, non-irrigated 21.1 69.1 17.2 14.2 62.9 64.0
Pasture-improved, irrigated 0.6 0 0.2