Resource use and environmental impacts from Australian chicken meat production

Agri-food industries such as chicken meat production face increasing pressure to quantify and improve their environmental performance over time, while simultaneously increasing production to meet global demand. Using life cycle assessment, this study aimed to quantify resource use, environmental impacts and hotspots for Australian chicken meat production using updated inventories and new methods. Two contrasting states; Queensland, and South Australia, and two housing systems; conventional and free range were analysed to indicate the variation expected between regions and systems. Lower impacts were observed per kilogram of chicken meat produced in South Australia compared to Queensland for fossil fuel energy, greenhouse gas (including land use and direct land use change) and fresh water consumption (18.1 and 21.4 MJ, 2.8 and 3.4 kg CO2-e, 38 and 111 L respectively), but not arable land or stress weighted water use (22.5 and 14 m2, 36 and 26 L H2O-e respectively). Feed production was the largest contributor to all impact categories, and also showed the largest variation between regions, highlighting the importance of spatially specific feed grain datasets to determine resource use and greenhouse gas from chicken meat production. While the feed conversion ratio was lower in South Australia, this was found to be less significant than differences related to crop yield, irrigation water use and the use of imported feed ingredients, suggesting that incremental improvements in feed conversion ratio will result in lower impacts only when feed inputs and production systems do not change. Fresh water consumption was lower in South Australia, but did not correlate with stress weighed water use (lower in Queensland), highlighting that volumetric water use is not a reliable indicator of the impact of water use. We did not observe substantial differences between conventional and free range production when feed related differences were removed, because key productivity factors such as feed conversion ratio were similar between the two housing types in Australia. While results were found to vary between regions, total greenhouse gas emissions were low from these Australian supply chains, and resource use was moderate. Expansion of the study to include additional regions and impact categories is recommended in future benchmarking studies.