A Roadmap to a Sustainable Beef System

The security and continuity of our food supply chains depend on healthy soil, clean water and a stable climate—all factors that impact a producer’s ability to grow crops and raise livestock. Businesses are increasingly recognizing these connections and including environmental factors into their business models. One way they do this is by setting sustainability goals related to nature conservation and climate change.

Building a Sustainable Beef System

For several decades, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has worked with farming and ranching communities—from individuals to local organizations to national entities like the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef—to collaboratively advance conservation. Recently, TNC worked with Walmart to identify opportunities and actions to improve sustainability in its beef supply. Just last week, Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club U.S. announced new aspirations to source fresh beef products more sustainably by 2025, with a focus on grazing management and soil health across an additional 12 million acres.

TNC also partnered with the University of Minnesota to analyze McDonald’s beef and chicken supply chains and identify climate mitigation opportunities. Based on this work, McDonald’s is now building programs with their suppliers to meet their company’s ambitious 31 percent greenhouse gas reduction goal.

The work with McDonald’s and Walmart led TNC scientists to develop a Roadmap for a Sustainable Beef System. The Roadmap distills scientific evidence related to beef production practices and can help companies identify opportunities and make supply chain improvements, while tracking progress toward their environmental and other sustainability goals. For example, TNC is using the Roadmap to work with Tyson to help operationalize strategies in their beef supply chain that empower producers to adopt sustainable practices on the ground. Using science as a guidepost, TNC is helping businesses create solutions that are both environmentally friendly and economically favorable, while delivering a product that meets consumers’ expectations.

Sustainability needs to be business-as-usual in the U.S. beef industry in order to ensure long-term food production, economic security for ranchers and their communities, and a healthy environment for us all. Seeing some of the world’s largest purchasers of beef take proactive steps to achieve sustainability within their own supply chains signals tremendous momentum in that direction. Important strides are being made, but there’s still so much more to do.