Despite the current world recession, the trend for people around the world to eat more meat shows no sign of diminishing. In simple terms, there are more people, and more of them are wealthy enough to eat meat than ever before. The United Nations estimates that livestock creates 18% of the world greenhouse gases.

 

Much of that meat is coming from Brazil, a powerhouse of large scale farming. But until recently, the environmental performance of the industry was not high on the agenda. Brazil's livestock industry creates huge amounts of pig manure and most of it was going untreated. It is estimated that a typical farm with 300 breeding pigs was making as much pollution as a town of 75,000 people, and most of it was going straight into the soil and leaking into water courses.

 

The stench and pollution was a major issue, attracting insects and rats, but the creation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, made the problem one of global concern. Methane from swine manure is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

 

Jose de Souza is the agricultural minister of the southern pig farming state of Parana. He said: 'The area around the city of Toledo has a current pig population of 440,000 pigs in 900 farms and those pigs make as much waste as two and half million people. You can understand how the land has become completely saturated. There was a holiday weekend when we had to close the water system for three days because of leakage, so something had to be done.'

 

A filthy business

 

That was bad news for the environment, but pig farmers were facing economic as well as environmental pressure. With just one product, they had no other crops to fall back on if pork prices dropped. Young farmers were leaving the land – in part put off by the image of a filthy business. This was threatening the future supply of the big meat suppliers like Sadia, which exports to 100 countries around the world. Its products are found in Europe, Russia, Japan, the Americas and South-East Asia where it is a main supplier of the catering and restaurant trade.

 

Sadia took action and launched a programme called 3S – the Sadia programme for Sustainable Swine Production – to help farmers cut their greenhouse gases. A major part of the programme is aimed at converting manure into biogas which powers lights and equipment on the farm. The company helps the farmers install bio-digesters – a cost which is recouped by fuel bill savings and the sale of carbon credits. The bio-digesters leave a by-product which can be used as fertiliser or fish food, helping farmers diversify into fish farming and soya production.

 

One of the farmers involved was Sergio Pedro Tassi from the small village of Planalto, in the Midwest state of Santa Catarina. He has been farming for 17 years and produces 1,500 pigs every 130 days. He said: 'We realised that you can no longer produce using the old system, when the main concern was the economic conditions: profit and loss.  I feel at peace when I watch the bio-digester working.'

 

He works the farm with his son Odair, 29, who says: 'Investing in a biodigester, as we did, is a way to give sustainability to the farm.' His younger brother Ronei, 24, added:  'By disposing of the waste, before using it as fertilizer, I know I am helping to reduce the generation of greenhouse effect gas.'

 

Easily replicated

As well as benefiting the environment, the farmers are also benefitting in hard economic terms. The bio-digester is generating energy that produces hot water for cleaning their dairy sheds and milking parlours. It is used in farm machinery and slurry pumps too. Sadia believes that the programme is cutting half a tonne of carbon dioxide a year per animal and the programme can be easily replicated anywhere in the world.

 

The programme is now improving Sadia's environmental performance at no cost to its business. Its technicians visit farms to reassure producers that the scheme will work. The process of getting carbon credits is complex so the company deals with that and lets the farmers get on with their work.  Big challenges in finding suppliers and in measuring the gas have also had to be overcome. Unfortunately, methane is highly corrosive and existing devices corroded quickly.

 

The company borrowed R$60 million from the Brazilian Development Bank to expand the project. It was expected that 50% of the producers would want to enrol, but by 2007 96% had indicated that they wanted to sign up. The digesters are initially owned by Sadia and producers are expected to pay for them within five years.

 

Carbon credits

 

Under the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism, Sadia is able to sell carbon credits. In May 2006 the company sold the first 290,000 tons of credits. The European Carbon Fund also bought 2.5m carbon credits – the equivalent of the carbon dioxide from more than one hundred thousand tanker loads of petrol or 1.5m cars in a year. A big business, Sadia is able to make a big difference.  At least 3m litres of waste is already being processed a day – equivalent to 5% of the country's volume.

 

The price of carbon is key to the success of the project, as is the ability to conquer the technology to make the process work as efficiently as possible.