Labels sometimes mislead pork shoppers, such as a wrong assumption that organic means lower greenhouse gas emissions. They are actually higher, said a report published in Nature Food scientific journal.
The study evaluated different types of pig farming in the United Kingdom and Brazil including woodland, organic, free range, RSPCA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) assured, and Red Tractor (Assured Food Standards) certified.
It assessed each system’s’ impact across four areas: land use (representing biodiversity loss), greenhouse gas emissions, antibiotics use and animal welfare. The study concludes that none of the farm types performed consistently well across all four areas.
However, there were individual farms that did perform well in all of them, including an indoor Red Tractor farm, an outdoor-bred and indoor-finished RSPCA assured farm and fully outdoor woodland farm.
“Outliers like these show that trade-offs are not inevitable,” said lead author Dr Harriet Bartlett, Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
“Somewhat unexpectedly we found that a handful of farms perform far better than average across all four of our environmental and welfare measures,” said senior author Andrew Balmford, professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge. However, none of the current label or assurance schemes predicted which farms these would be.
“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,” said Dr Bartlett.
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 kilogram 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 way we classify livestock farms must be improved, Dr Bartlett said, because livestock production is growing rapidly, especially pork production, which has quadrupled in the past 50 years and already accounts for nine per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.
The study reached its conclusions using data from 74 businesses in the United Kingdom and 17 Brazilian breed-to-finish systems. Each made up of one to three farms and representing the annual production of more than 1.2 million pigs.
“To the best of our knowledge, our dataset covers by far the largest and most diverse sample of pig production systems examined in any single study” said Dr Bartlett.
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.
He said “it also clearly demonstrates the critical importance that individual farmers play in promoting best practice across all farming systems.”