Within the next two to three years, farmers will have no option but to embrace annual carbon audits if they want to do business with major retailers, a leading sustainability expert has claimed.

Visiting Belfast last Thursday, Jose Villalon, corporate sustainability director at Dutch company Nutreco, which includes within its portfolio animal feed company Trouw Nutrition, warned that retailer specifications will soon demand a carbon footprint per litre or per kg.

“We can start to manipulate and influence the conversation to get ahead of it.

“It’s a bold move, but the seafood sector is already doing it to distinguish itself from poultry and pork. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel,” suggested Villalon.

To help farmers get an accurate handle on emissions, Trouw Nutrition is continuing to roll out its new FeedPrint programme to feed mills across Ireland.

The computer programme utilises the Global Feed Life Cycle Assessment Institute (GFLI) database as the starting point to assess the environmental impact of each feed ingredient.

For an individual feed mill in Ireland, the programme adds in emissions related to various factors, including the distance travelled by the feed ingredients, how they were transported, the energy used in the production process, and whether it ends up as a pellet or a coarse mix.

“We might have to change, down the line, the source of our raw materials.

Using this information, we could produce a more sustainable feed going forward,” suggested Jim Uprichard from Trouw Nutrition Ireland.

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