Advancing Feed Ingredient Life Cycle Assessments

Feed accounts for roughly 40%-80% of the greenhouse gas footprint for animal agriculture and contributes to its water and land use footprints too. Life cycle assessments (LCA) are a method used to assess the environmental footprint of products and systems. To support the environmental footprint assessment of animal production systems and our pets, the animal food industry is working diligently to ensure accurate and current data is available for primary ingredients.

Most corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. are used in animal rations. This $128,000 project, funded by the United Soybean Board, is led by the Institute for Feed Education and Research in collaboration with Iowa State University and the Global Feed LCA Institute.

The project objectives are as follows:

1. Assess and advance a method for developing a robust and consistently current dataset for LCA quantification, providing more accurate evaluations and placing greater value on the production efficiency benefits of U.S. soybeans, corn and wheat relative to those produced in other geographies.
2. Perform a sensitivity analysis on the impact geographic scale has on LCA data inputs and outcomes.

This is a one-year project, which began in October 2023.