The LCA tool from Trouw Nutrition and Solid Forest to assess the environmental footprint of feed and farms.
Rigorous management of environmental metrics—including the complete environmental footprint of products—throughout the value chain is essential for making informed, sustainability-oriented decisions. In this context, Trouw Nutrition, a global leader in nutrition and solutions for the animal feed sector, maintains a firm commitment to the continuous environmental assessment of its products and the impact they generate on the farms that use them. With this purpose, it relied on the expertise of Solid Forest to develop MyFeedPrint, its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and environmental impacts tool, designed to accurately quantify the carbon footprint and environmental footprint associated with its feed and the final products obtained on livestock farms.
The challenge
Unlike other sectors, animal feed resembles an expert kitchen more than a standard production line. Each farm is analyzed individually and feed is formulated to measure according to the specific needs of each operation. This high variability makes traditional LCAs difficult to perform and also makes it challenging to obtain a comparable environmental footprint between products.
It was necessary to develop a tool that would streamline impact calculation and environmental footprint estimation, enabling technicians to understand the actual impact of Trouw Nutrition products used on each specific farm.
The solution had to:
- Efficiently calculate the impacts of a large number of feeds.
- Consider the entire life cycle: raw material production, transportation, manufacturing, distribution, and on-farm use, including emissions from animal digestion.
- Be accessible to users in multiple countries, in several languages, and with different access levels according to profile.
The developed solution
MyFeedPrint is the tool created to address these needs. It is a multi-user web application, available across much of Europe, that allows evaluation of the main environmental indicators and obtains a detailed environmental footprint for each feed:
- Climate change (carbon footprint): total, fossil, biogenic, and peatlands
- Acidification
- Eutrophication (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater)
- Fossil resource use
- Land use
- Water use
- Methane emissions
- Ammonia emissions
- NOx emissions
- Particulate emissions
MyFeedPrint follows a “cradle-to-gate” approach, integrating all processes that contribute to the environmental footprint of feed, from raw materials to delivery on farm.
MyMilkPrint: Expanding the scope
Following the success of the first version, Trouw Nutrition identified the potential to bring these results closer to dairy farms. Thus MyMilkPrint was born, the complement to MyFeedPrint that allows precise calculation of impacts and the environmental footprint per unit of milk produced.
MyMilkPrint incorporates:
- The specific feed of each farm.
- Animal emissions.
- Manure management.
- The effect of climate, dietary energy, ration formulation, and the use of emission-reducing additives.
Currently, MyFeedPrint and MyMilkPrint have nearly 400 users across Europe, performing dozens of calculations daily and helping the sector advance toward more sustainable livestock production.
Want to drive sustainability with reliable data?
If your company, organization, industry association, or stakeholder group is considering developing an environmental assessment tool or a customized digital solution, Solid Forest can help you make it a reality. Contact us.
