The climate is changing and whatever the cause be it greenhouse gas emissions or normal historical climate change the way we farm is going to have to adapt.
Farm businesses deserve great credit for completing environmental farm plans and for taking action to reduce their farm s carbon footprint. Still, more will be demanded from us.
There is a new environmental impact and assessment tool that is showing up across the global food chain. It is called Life Cycle Assessment or LCA. It will change the way we farm, how food is processed and how consumers make their food purchase decisions.
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Best of all, there are many positive opportunities for Canada s family farm businesses to gain measurable premiums in the market place using this new assessment tool.
Developed by industrial engineers in the 1960s and 70s, LCA is a method for deconstructing everything that goes into a product. It systematically breaks down any manufactured item into the components and the processes that went into making it. LCA then measures, with near-surgical precision, a cradle-to-grave inventory, assessing the total impact on the environment from the beginning of production all the way through to final disposal.
Now, LCA can convert every food product into a single number that reflects everything including the carbon footprint of the tractors and equipment used on the farm plus production inputs, chemicals, livestock feed, treatment of workers, and much, much more.
This will soon be the new math used in businesses and farming across the globe.
LCA is rapidly being adopted by agriculture and food production systems. Leading firms are already using LCA. For example, a snack-sized bag of Walkers salt and vinegar potato chips (a UK product) has a label that tells you its carbon footprint is 75 grams of carbon emissions (compared to 713,000 grams per passenger on a jumbo jet from Frankfurt to New York).
The bag also proclaims that Walkers has been working with an outfit called the Carbon Trust to analyze the carbon footprints of its products and to find ways to reduce them. This comprehensive process analysis is quickly gaining momentum. Tesco, the huge British super market, has committed to labelling the carbon footprint of all 70,000 products it carries.
A California research group known as GoodGuide is devel-
