The environmental impact is one of the major pillars of concerns when
addressing the sustainability of food production and sustainable food
consumption strategies.
To assess to what extent food production affects the environment, one
needs to choose a proper environmental assessment tool. Different types
of assessment tools have been developed to establish environmental
indicators, which can be used to determine the environmental impact of
livestock production systems or agricultural products. The environmental
assessment tools can be divided into the area based or product based
(Halberg et al., 2005). Area-based indicators are, for example, nitrate
leached per hectare from a pig farm, and product-based indicators are, for
example, global warming potential per kg pork (Dalgaard, 2007).
The area-based indicators are useful for evaluating farm emissions of
nutrients such as nitrate that has an effect on the local environment. On the
other hand, when considering the greenhouse gas emissions from the
agricultural production, the product-based indicators are useful for
evaluating the impact of food productions on the global environment (e. g.,
climate change) and have the advantage that in addition to emissions from
the farms, emissions related to the production of input s (e.g., soybean and
artificial fertilizer) and outputs (e.g., slurry exported to other farms) are
also included. In that way it is easier to avoid pollution