The National Pork Board has unveiled a new computer program designed to help pork producers identify areas on their farms where they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Live Swine Carbon Footprint Calculator, developed on behalf of the National Pork Board by the University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center, was unveiled yesterday as part of World Pork Expo in Des Moines.
The software allows pork producers to input data from their own operations to compute the carbon footprint of a barn of pigs from breeding to market.
Dr. Rick Ulrich, a professor of chemical engineering with the University of Arkansas, says the software was developed to help pork producers identify the hot spots of greenhouse gas production.
The farmer will be able to input into the program things that we would expect that he would either know about his operation or that he could easily find out, things like how many fans, the horse power of the fans, how does he heat his barn, how many pigs in the barn, what type of barn, that sort of thing.
What he would get out of the other end of the program in about three minutes of run time is he would find out where greenhouse gas emissions are on his operation and how much.
When people mainly think about reducing greenhouse gases they think about saving energy in order to knock down CO2 emissions.
That’s what works in your cars and your airplanes and in your house but a pork farm is a very different place.
The main emissions on pork farms comes from emissions from manure, methane coming off of manure and to a lesser extent nitrous oxide.
Also there are quite a bit of methane emissions and CO2 from feed production so those things that you tend to do to save emissions from your home don’t work very well on the pork farm because most of those emissions seem to be tied up in manure and feed.
Those are the areas that the farmer would want to look at in order to reduce his impact.
Dr. Ulrich notes pork production doesn’t contribute much to greenhouse gases throughout the world but still pork producers want to be good stewards of the environment.
He says those places where the farmer can cut back greenhouse gases they should but their businesses still have to remain viable.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
