Assessing the Environmental Impact of Extensive Beef Production in Grazing Lands of Argentina

Because of environmental constraints, beef cattle was for more than a century the only viable farming option in the extensive semiarid and subhumid lands of Argentina and the main source of nutrients for humans as well. However, a growing concern and criticism have risen today about its possible negative impact on the climate and the environment. These worries tend to affect current public opinions, national policies, and international trade. Based on 40 beef cattle farms scattered across different semiarid and subhumid regions of Argentina, here we evaluated the impact of extensive cattle production on carbon, water, and nutrient pollution. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Land-Based Assessment (LBA) were the two approaches we used here to compare the environmental impact of beef production. While the environmental footprint (EF) resulting from LCA expresses the impact per unit of food, the environmental balance (EB), derived from LBA, aims at quantifying the impact per unit of land. As such, the EB considers both negative and positive impacts on the farm as an integrated system. Following standardized procedures, we evaluated EF and EB up to the farm gate, leaving aside delocalized post-farm impacts such as those of processing, packaging, and transportation that occur beyond the farm gate. In agreement with previous evidence, our results show that the EF tends to decrease as per-head production increases. Correlation coef fi cients and statistical signi fi cance were the following for carbon (R = - 0.574; p < 0.01), water (R = - 0.561; p < 0.01), and N (R = - 0.704; p < 0.01) and Phosphorus (P) pollution (R = - 0.802; p < 0.01) footprints. On the contrary, the EB seems to be highly sensitive, and as per-hectare beef production increases. Correlations were the following for carbon emissions (CE: R = 0.955; p < 0.01), water consumption (WC: R = 0.822; p < 0.01), nitrogen excretion (NE: R = 0.948; p < 0.01) and phosphorus excretion (PE: R = 0.945; p < 0.01). What our results suggest is that the notion of EF is useful to evaluate the environmental impact in intensive beef production systems, and the EB is suitable to assess the impact of the extensive ones. In practice, both approaches provide different perspectives on the environmental-impact problem and they should be complementary used. We concluded that the methodological rigidity of EF does not allow proper discrimination among farms in the extensive systems. On the contrary, the EB approach tended to be highly sensitive to detecting differences between individual farms and farmers, thus allowing the identi fi cation of successful options for extensive beef production in terms of public image, policy-making, and commercial opportunities.