Life Cycle Analysis of Pigs in Sweden: An Environmental Breakdown.

I think the title of this brief diary says, um, about all we need to say.

There is a report in the scientific journal International Journal of Life Cycle Analysis on the environmental cost of, um, like, um, well, raising pigs.   The authors are Ingrid Strid Eriksson*, Helena Elmquist, Susanne Stern and Thomas Nybrant at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala Sweden.  (Int J LCA 10 (2) 143 – 154 (2005))

Pig meat is the most common type of meat consumed in Sweden, amounting to 36 kg pig meat per person and year (SBA 2002a). Most pig meat consumed in Sweden is produced within the country; and the production corresponds to 3.2 million pigs per year (SBA 2001a, SBA 2002b). Conventional Swedish pig production can briefly be described as consisting of two consecutive phases: rearing of sows that produce piglets and growing of piglets to produce slaughter pigs for the meat industry.

I'm not quite sure how this differs from say, Ecuadoran pig production in the details, but, um, um, um...

Here's some other revelations:

The present production of Swedish pig meat gives rise to an environmental impact in terms of energy use, eutrophication of waters, contribution to global warming and acidification, ecological toxification by use of pesticides, soil erosion and loss of biological diversity(Cederberg and Darelius 2001). In order to facilitate the development towards a more sustainable production, there is a need to analyse the potential for improvement in the system...

Anyway in case you were wondering:

4 Methods.

The methodological approach of this environmental systems analysis was to utilise substance flow models complemented by life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. The substance flow models were developed as part of the research project and are named SALSA-arable (Elmquist et al. 2004) and SALSA-pig; SALSA stands for Systems Analysis for Sustainable Agriculture. The SALSA-pig model is intended to be used in combination with SALSA-arable in order to analyse an entire system of production of growing-finishing pigs.

Swedish SALSA pigs...

It gets better, I swear.

There are some really cool figures on energy expenditures for growing various crops in Sweden.   For instance, there's a really cool table describing the energy inputs of various crops in Sweden - crops that end up as pig feed.   For instance, in case you wanted to know, a hectare of Swedish rapeseed crops consumes about 94 liters of tractor fuel in Sweden, and if dried by the use of fuel oil, about 450 MJ of heat per acre.  

For rapeseed cake, about 1360 MJ of energy are consumed per hectare for extraction of the cake from the chaff.

These are good figures to keep in the back of one's mind.

(Rapeseed is the most common source plant for biodiesel in Europe, by the way, although I'll leave the relationship between pigs and biodiesel to the imagination.)

It appears that the global warming impact of one kg of Swedish pig feed is 290 grams of carbon dioxide for barley and 730 grams for soybean meal.  (See table 6 in the paper.)  The global warming potential is a 100 year timeframe for those with a technical bent.

Pigs, I think, fart methane.

The acidification potential for raising a kg of pig is the equivalent of the release of 20 grams of sulfur dioxide.

Some of the cost, notes the paper, can be ameliorated by using electricity instead of fuel oil though:

Note that Swedish electricity production is based on hydro-and nuclear power and thereby generates very little carbon dioxide, compared to many other countries that have a fossil fuel-based electricity production.

Good for Sweden.

About that acid:

Of the emissions of acidifying substances, 78–88% originated from the pig sub-system, consisting almost entirely of ammonia from animals and manure. Most of the ammonia (59–63%) was released already in the barn. The feed production sub-system contributed the remaining 12– 2%, of which combustion of fossil fuels (field operations and transport)
was the most important (Fig. 5).

You may think that ammonia is a base, but in the pig subsystem - don't you love that term, pig subsystem? - the ammonia is quickly converted to nitric acid.   Trust me on this.

Much of the world's fixed nitrogen, as I have written in previous diaries, is in fact industrially fixed.

According to this paper, each kg of pig releases about 1.5 kg of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the form of carbon dioxide.   (Other authors cited claimed much higher figures.)

I felt you really needed to know this stuff about pigs in Sweden.