Consumer choices and pasture fed livestock products

  • Six focus groups were held to discuss shopping and eating habits around red meat with individuals representative of PFLA meat consumers, supermarket meat consumers and flexitarians.
  • Participants discussed what affected decision making (including labelling) when buying meat and wider debates around food systems.

The outcomes of the workshop have been shared with the PFLA and with project stakeholders. A short academic paper is planned.

Greenhouse gas based assessment of pasture fed livestock

  • Agrecalc, a farm Carbon calculator was used to compare the environmental performance of the 56 grass-fed beef cattle production systems sampled in year one.
  • Results will provide an evaluation of GHG emissions per output unit and farm area and enable comparisons across farms based on enterprise types/locations etc.

We have completed this work but ran out of resource in the project to analyse these results. We are hoping the work may be completed as part of a current PhD project.

Comparative environmental life cycle assessment of cattle production systems

  • Comparison of the environmental performance of different cattle production systems, ranging from conventional part housed and large-scale, fully housed dairy and beef to all-forage based production and including sub-set of organic production.
  • The core method of analysis will apply systems-based environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), using an enhanced version of the Defra-funded Cranfield model. The main environmental impacts will include greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water quality (e.g. eutrophication potential) and air quality (e.g. acidification potential and nitrogen oxides), non-renewable resource consumption, stress-weighted blue water consumption and land use.

This work is complete and is with Defra. We hope to see it published in early 2023.
 

EU Pathways project

Pathways project logo

Building on our work in SEEGSLIP, the EU Horizon 2020 Pathways project will develop sustainable food systems to support Europe’s Farm-to-Fork strategy. Pathways is Coordinated by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and led by Laurence Smith (SLU & University of Reading) who was part of the SEEGSLIP team.

PATHWAYS will run for five years (2021-2026), with 28 partners from 12 countries including UKCEH and other research institutes along with universities, NGOs, think tanks, SMEs, industry associations, and multi-nationals – mobilising stakeholders along every step of the food value chain. The project will work closely with the PFLA.

Read Pathways launch press release

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