Global Interest In Producing Sustainable Beef

The U.S. cattle industry has a great sustainability story to tell. A key player in helping measure sustainability and tell the story is Kim Stackhouse-Lawson. She is the Director of Sustainability Research for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Stackhouse-Lawson said while the cattle industry has done a good job in improving its environmental footprint in recent years, there is still some improvements that can be made. Not just for the beef industry but across the entire food chain that lies at the end of the food pipeline.

“Forty percent of the food agriculture produces is wasted,” Stackhouse-Lawson said. “Only 20 percent of beef is wasted, but if we could reduce consumer food waste by half, we could improve the sustainability of beef 10 percent overnight. So it is absolutely the full chain working together to create more sustainable beef.”

There are lots of critics of beef production. Stackhouse-Lawson said unfortunately in the sustainability space, it is so complex there isn't a easy way to combat those negative messages. In talking with critics, she recommends walking them through the value chain and explain beef production and how it contributes more than just beef. For instance, beef production provides open space for wildlife habitat, which sequesters carbon and provides clean water.

The U.S. beef sustainability study was supported by the dollar per head beef checkoff. The next step is communicating those findings to four main audiences of producers, influences, the global sustainability community and to retailers. Stackhouse-Lawson said in working with producers she is finding producers want scientific evidence backing up their message.

“We’ve been sustainable as an industry for a long, long time, we have six and seventh generation ranchers and those producers want to be able to tell our story, so for them that outreach is just giving those individuals the language to talk about sustainability to some of our critics,” Stackhouse-Lawson said.

Stackhouse-Lawson is also working with the influencer audience, which includes registered dieticians, doctors and the medical community. She said this group is very intelligent, well educated and they understand complex systems, but sometimes do not understand how sustainability relates to beef. Stackhouse-Lawson spends a lot of time talking with health professionals in explaining the complexity of beef production, along with information of many of the positive benefits of beef that are not being measured currently through the lifecycle assessment.