PASA has been investigating the role of pastured livestock in the regional food system.
“Can farmers realistically scale-up pastured production to become a bigger, more mainstream part of our food system? This is a complex problem, involving daunting challenges in production, marketing, and distribution. As a starting point, it’s important to understand just how much land it takes to produce pastured animals, and where some of the bottlenecks for more efficient production may lie.
To get at this question, PASA’s SOIL Institute has been working with pastured livestock farmers across the state to share on-farm data on production and inputs for their operations. Over the past summer, a total of 8 farms shared data from their farms needed to calculate their ‘land use footprint,’ that is how many acres of land they need to produce a pound of meat.”
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