Sustainability of Beef Production: Farm Size, Inputs, and Impacts

Pfeiler, Maya

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Sustainability of Beef Production: Farm Size, Inputs, and Impacts Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/mc87pr79b

Abstract

Global food systems have significant environmental impacts. This is especially true of beef production. The environmental sustainability of a beef production system can be measured in terms of its resource use (i.e., inputs) and its environmental externalities (i.e., impacts), which, according to previous studies, may also be associated with farm size. Farm size can be conceptualized in several ways including: as the number of animals, land area, or productive output. In this thesis, I explore the relationship between farm size, resource inputs, and environmental impacts for beef cattle production systems across five regions. I use data from Poore and Nemecek (2018) that contains production system-level data for beef to compare farm size – measured as number of cattle, area of permanent pasture, and productivity – to two resource inputs (water and land use) and three impacts (eutrophication, acidification, and greenhouse gas emissions). I analyzed these relationships in RStudio to identify relationships between the studied variables and developed a conceptual framework to interpret my results. The global trends from my analysis indicated that smaller farms (in terms of the number of cattle and productivity) were more sustainable when looking at environmental impacts. However, trends in environmental impacts varied significantly between and within regions, suggesting the global trend may not represent the entire complexity of these relationships. The relative best (defined as most efficient) farms were generally conventional dairy operations with high levels of management. The relative worst farms were generally extensive systems with little to no management. My results suggest that different measures of farm size reveal different relationships between inputs and impacts across beef production systems, which may be useful for other researchers conceptualizing and measuring farm-level sustainability. While further research is needed to understand regional variation in these trends, the trends identified in this research could help producers, decision-makers, and researchers to identify opportunities to improve the environmental efficiency of beef production.

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