Economic approaches to allocation of life cycle environmental burdens between beef production systems and ecosystem services
Date
2021
Authors
Haddix, Jilleen D., author
Dillon, Jasmine A., advisor
Ahola, Jason, committee member
Sheehan, John, committee member
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Abstract
Buck Island Ranch (BIR) is a cow-calf operation in central Florida that manages over 4,200 hectares of semi-native and improved pasture and produces over 2,000 calves each year. The operation has the unique distinction of being both a working ranch and a conservation site with extensive monitoring of everything from species diversity across taxa to nutrient dynamics in pastures and wetlands for the past 30 years. As a result of managing for profitable beef production and conservation, they provide key ecosystem services to their community through conservation oriented management practices. The primary goal of this project was to perform a cradle to farm gate life cycle assessment (LCA) of environmental impacts and resource consumption in the production of BIR live weight (LW) sold from the ranch. In addition, reproducible methods were developed for multi-functional allocation of environmental impacts between beef and conservation benefits. The LCA was conducted using four approaches to economic allocation of emissions between beef and ecosystem services: (1) allocate all emissions to beef; (2) multifunctional allocation using payments for conservation management practices through the USDA Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP); (3) multi-functional allocation using the "highest and best use" (HBU) price based on real estate evaluation of BIR land; (4) multi-functional allocation using conservation easement prices set by the USDA Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP). The results of the life cycle impact assessment were as follows: 1 kg LW leaving the farm gate to be sold used 322.22 L of water consumption, 43.97 m2 annual crop-eq, and 2.01 MJ energy surplus. The associated emissions were 12.27 kg CO2-eq/kg LW and 36.97 g N-eq/kg LW. When emissions were allocated between beef and ecosystem services, the impacts for beef were reduced 2% using the CSP approach, 39% using the HBU approach, and 42% using the ACEP approach.
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Subject
economic allocation
life cycle assessment
carbon footprint
multi-functional
ecosystem services