Pork Environmental Roadmap webinar

First, it provides a clearer evidence base for decision making. By bringing together the latest life cycle assessment, wider sector data and real examples from across the industry, it helps identify where progress has already been made and where the most meaningful further gains are likely to be.

Second, it gives the sector a shared framework for action. The roadmap is intended to guide work on the seven priority areas, help focus investment and collaboration, and support the rollout of practical improvements over time through the action plan.

Third, it helps the sector communicate more credibly. The roadmap gives producers, processors and representative bodies a common set of evidence and messages that can be used in conversations with retailers, government, investors, planners and wider stakeholders. That is particularly important where the sector needs to challenge broad assumptions with sector-specific evidence.

Fourth, it supports future monitoring and accountability. Repeating the life cycle assessment every five years will allow the sector to track change over time and show transparently where further progress is being made.

Fifth, it helps strengthen collaboration across the supply chain. Many of the issues covered in the roadmap, such as feed, nutrients, energy, biodiversity and carbon accounting, cannot be addressed by one part of the industry alone. The roadmap creates a basis for more joined-up working.

For the levy payer, the benefits are more practical and immediate. It helps recognise the improvements already made on farm, provides stronger evidence to support business decisions and can help producers demonstrate progress to processors, retailers, lenders and policymakers. It should also help identify where future environmental gains are practical, cost-effective and aligned with commercially viable production.

For the wider British pork supply chain, the benefits are broader. The roadmap strengthens the sector’s credibility, supports market access, improves the basis for policy engagement and helps protect the reputation of British pork as a responsible, efficient and high-quality product. In that sense, it is both a technical evidence base and a strategic tool for the sector’s long-term resilience and competitiveness.

In the short term, the focus is on building baselines, improving data and setting clear frameworks for action.

In the medium term, the priority is wider adoption of proven approaches and scaling best practice across the sector.

In the long term, the roadmap will use repeat life cycle assessments and refreshed evidence to measure progress, refine priorities and support the next phase of improvement.

Yes, the roadmap recognises that while some environmental improvements are cost-saving or cost-neutral, others will require additional investment. That is particularly true in areas such as slurry infrastructure, some nutrient management technologies, renewable energy and certain air quality measures.

For that reason, the roadmap does point to the need for targeted support, particularly where the sector is being asked to adopt measures that deliver wider public or policy benefit but are difficult to fund through normal farm margins alone.

In practical terms, that means continued engagement with Defra and other government bodies on areas such as capital support, innovation funding and policies that help de-risk adoption of new technologies. The action plan reflects this in places, for example around improved manure storage infrastructure, innovation funding and support for practical uptake of mitigation measures.

On supermarkets, the position is generally positive, although support will vary by business. Retailers are increasingly interested in credible, sector-wide evidence on environmental performance, and the roadmap helps provide that. It gives the supply chain a stronger shared framework for discussing progress, priorities and expectations.

That said, continued retailer support will be important if the sector is to move beyond evidence and into wider adoption of improvements, especially where those changes bring extra cost.

So, the roadmap is helpful, but it does not remove the need for ongoing commercial conversations about how the value and cost of change are shared fairly across the supply chain.

One of the strengths of the roadmap is that it brings together sector-specific evidence in a clear and credible way. This could be very useful in planning contexts where decisions are sometimes shaped by broad assumptions or one-sided narratives.

Extracting a small number of key evidence-based messages for local planners could help provide a more balanced picture of modern British pork production, the progress already made by the sector and the practical measures being taken to reduce its environmental impact.

We have been working with the NPA and AIMS to address the issue of mass objections made by animal activist groups against applications to erect new farm buildings on pig production premises. We hope that by making local planning authorities aware of the roadmap (and its content), it will help them ignore the often spurious claims made by the objectors.

It is encouraging that the roadmap is seen as a clear evolution from the original while keeping the core messages and overall direction consistent.

On planning and permitting, that is an important point. The roadmap does help show how far the sector has already come and provides a stronger evidence base for discussions with regulators and policymakers.

If the pig industry is to continue investing in improved housing, slurry systems and other environmental measures, then planning and permitting frameworks need to enable that progress rather than slow it down.

There is a real opportunity here to use the roadmap to support more balanced discussions with Natural England, the Environment Agency and others, particularly where robust evidence is needed to meet habitats regulations requirements.

The point on slurry and manure values is well made. New evidence and farm-level data can help update and improve the standard values used in RB209, particularly as the range of organic materials in use continues to grow.

However, the key message will always remain the same: standard values are a useful starting point, but the best estimate of available nutrients comes from testing materials on the individual farm before use.

Farm-specific analysis helps businesses make the most of the nutrient value of manures and slurries while reducing the risks associated with relying on generic assumptions. Collecting more current farm-level data, including nutrient values and associated volumes, would therefore strengthen both the evidence base and future guidance.

Overall, these are exactly the kinds of practical issues the roadmap is intended to help surface, and they underline why it needs to remain a living piece of work.

There is scope for the industry to reduce reliance on soya further, but there are practical limits and it is unlikely to be removed entirely in the short term.

The sector has already made significant progress through better feed efficiency, more precise diet formulation and greater use of alternative proteins and co- and by-products from the food industry.

Further reductions are likely to come from continued improvements in nutrition, wider use of home-grown proteins, such as peas and beans where appropriate, and ongoing innovation in feed formulation.

However, soya remains a highly effective ingredient in rations, particularly where digestibility and amino acid balance are critical, such as in lactating sow diets.

So, there is likely to be continued reduction where it is practical, nutritionally sound and commercially viable.

The focus should be on reducing dependency, improving sourcing standards where soya is still needed and continuing to explore lower-emission alternatives.

The subject of investigating opportunities to reduce the industry’s reliance on imported soya features in our business plan, and we will be looking at progressing this work over the next three years.

Yes, there are still some important data gaps in feed material LCAs. The main challenges relate to assumptions around ingredient origin, processing, allocation methods and land-use change, particularly for globally traded commodities such as soya.

There are also uncertainties around some co- and by-products, where allocation rules are not always applied consistently, and around newer alternative proteins where robust UK-relevant data are still limited.

Improving primary data on feed formulations and sourcing patterns over time will help reduce reliance on generic data sets and strengthen the robustness of future assessments, including the next LCA in 2029 for the 2028 production year.

Processed animal proteins, or PAPs, are one of the areas that could help reduce reliance on imported soya, but their future in pig feed in Great Britain depends on the outcome of recent policy work rather than on the roadmap alone.

In February 2025, Defra and the Welsh Government consulted on allowing poultry PAP in pig feed, porcine PAP in poultry feed, insect PAP in pig and poultry feed, and some other protein changes, reflecting similar EU changes made in 2021.

From a roadmap perspective, PAPs are best seen as a potential partial replacement rather than a complete solution. They may help reduce demand for soya, support a more circular use of category 3 animal by-products and improve resource efficiency, but any uptake would still need to be safe, practical, commercially viable and acceptable to supply chains and consumers.

The Government’s published response notes that supporters highlighted environmental benefits and reduced reliance on imported soya bean-based feed, while concerns raised by others focused on biosecurity, public perception and ethics.

So, the realistic answer is that PAPs could become part of the toolbox for partial soya replacement, particularly if regulations change and supply chains are comfortable with their use. But they are unlikely to be the only answer.

The wider direction of travel is still likely to be a combination of better feed efficiency, more precise formulation, greater use of co- and by-products, responsible sourcing of the soya that is still needed and continued exploration of alternatives.

This is a helpful point. By 2028, some responsible soya sourcing schemes may be able to provide evidence going back to 2008, allowing them to demonstrate no land-use change for soya supplied under those schemes.

If so, that would improve the robustness of soya LCA data and make 2028 a particularly valuable point for the next roadmap review.

The main differences are likely to be productivity, feed efficiency, feed sourcing and land-use change.

British pork benefits from relatively efficient production systems, better growth and feed conversion, and lower land-use change impacts through improved feed formulation and more responsible sourcing.

By contrast, the global average includes a much wider range of systems, including less efficient production and higher-emission feed sources, which pushes the average footprint up.

Greater processor ownership of pigs and feed does increase exposure to emissions performance, but it also increases the ability to influence improvement.

The priority should be reducing emissions intensity through feed, efficiency, health, manure and energy management, rather than relying on land ownership alone to offset emissions.

Where processors have limited land in their own business, stronger partnerships across the supply chain will be important to account for nutrient recycling, carbon removals and wider environmental benefits in a credible way.

The UK pig industry compares well with many international competitors on efficiency, environmental performance and the strength of its regulatory and assurance framework.

British pork has a lower farmgate footprint than the global average, and the roadmap shows measurable progress on carbon footprint and land-use change emissions.

The sector should absolutely use that evidence to challenge simplistic ‘factory farming’ narratives, but the strongest response is through transparent outcomes, welfare standards, assurance and a clear commitment to continued improvement, rather than through efficiency claims alone.

Potentially, yes. If VERA only accepts a narrow set of methodologies or does not provide a clear route for recognising equivalent data generated through other robust methods, that could make widespread future monitoring more difficult.

The key issue is interoperability – the sector needs a system that is credible and consistent but also practical enough to work at scale without excluding useful data or creating unnecessary barriers to participation.