A first-of-its-kind study lays out, on a county-by-county basis, the environmental impact of growing corn in the United States, offering the industry an unprecedented tool for improving sustainability along its supply chain.
“Think of the new research as a computer model of the United States of Corn,” says Bloomberg. “It allows everyone to judge with previously impractical detail where corn has the biggest impact on the environment. With localized information about where corn comes from, and where it ends up being eaten by cattle, swine, or foul, or cooked into auto fuel, companies can better understand where in their supply chains the most carbon is burned, the most water is used, and where the landscape is most transformed.”
Called the Food System Supply Chain Sustainability model, it “provides a means to link county-level corn production in the U.S. to firm-specific demand locations associated with downstream processing facilities,” say Timothy Smith of the University of Minnesota and his five co-authors.
For example, companies could use the model to learn that a bushel of corn grown in western South Dakota “may be three or four times as carbon-intensive as a bushel from southern Minnesota,” says Bloomberg.
Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer, test-drove the model when the company used data from the study to predict that it could reduce company-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2025.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers chose to focus on corn because of its connection to the meat and ethanol industries, which have particularly high environmental impact.