Pig farms’ performance in delivering a low environmental impact and high welfare cannot be predicted by their system of production and is not reflected in current food labelling schemes, according to detailed new research.
The study’s lead author, Dr Harriet Bartlett, Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, said the findings showed that farms should be rewarded for ‘meaningful outcomes’, rather than farm types or practices.
The study, published in Nature Food, evaluated different types of pig farming – including woodland, organic, free range, RSPCA assured, and Red Tractor certified – to assess each systems’ impact across four areas: land use (representing biodiversity loss), greenhouse gas emissions, antibiotics use and animal welfare.
The study collected data from 74 UK and 17 Brazilian breed-to-finish systems, each made up of one to three farms, representing between them annual production of over 1.2 million pigs.
Some trade-offs were found. For example, generally, farms with low land use footprints had lower greenhouse gas footprints, but higher antibiotic use and poorer welfare.
But the study concluded that none of the farm types performed consistently well across all four areas – a finding the researchers said has important implications for increasingly climate conscious consumers, as well as farmers themselves.
However, some individual farms performed well in all domains, and the best-performing systems overall were spread across different types of pig farming.
Of the five systems in the best-performing 50% for all four externalities, three were RSPCA assured systems that were outdoor-bred and straw-yard finished, one was a fully outdoor woodland system and one was a Red tractor system with hybrid indoor–outdoor breeding and slatted finishing.
“Outliers like these show that trade-offs are not inevitable,” said Dr Bartlett. “The way we classify farm types and label pork isn’t helpful for making informed decisions when it comes to buying more sustainable meat.
“Even more importantly, we aren’t rewarding and incentivising the best-performing farmers. Instead of focusing on farm types or practices, we need to focus on meaningful outcomes for people, the planet and the pigs – and assess, and reward farms based on these.”
Senior author, Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, added: “Somewhat unexpectedly we found that a handful of farms perform far better than average across all four of our environmental and welfare measures. However, none of the current label or assurance schemes predicted which farms these would be.”
Misplaced food labelling assumptions
The findings also show that common assumptions around food labelling can be misplaced. For instance, organic farming systems, which consumers might see as climate and environmentally friendly, have on average three times the CO2 output per kg of meat of more intensive Red Tractor or RSPCA assured systems and four times the land use.
However, these same system on average use almost 90% fewer antibiotic medicines, and result in improved animal welfare compared with production from Red tractor or RSPCA assured systems, the researchers said.
Dr Bartlett said the researchers believed their dataset covers ‘by far the largest and most diverse sample of pig production systems examined in any single study’. She stressed that the way we classify livestock farms must be improved, as livestock production grows rapidly, especially pork production.
“Our findings show that mitigating the environmental impacts of livestock farming isn’t a case of saying which farm type is the best,” she said.
“There is substantial scope for improvement within types, and our current means of classification is not identifying the best farms for the planet and animals overall. Instead, we need to identify farms that successfully limit their impacts across all areas of societal concern, and understand, promote and incentivise their practises.”
The study appears to reinforce the point made by pig industry representatives in response to Defra’s recent consultation on Method of Production labelling – that system of production is not a good indicator of outcomes.
James Wood, Professor of Equine and Farm Animal Science at the University of Cambridge, said: “This important study identifies a key need to clarify what different farm labels should indicate to consumers; there is a pressing need to extend this work into other farming sectors.
“It also clearly demonstrates the critical importance that individual farmers play in promoting best practice across all farming systems.”
- You can watch Dr Harriet Bartlett explain the paper’s findings here.