Environmental sustainability assessment of ready-made baby foods: Meals, menus and diets

Although there is a growing body of literature on the environmental impacts of food, virtually none of the studies has addressed baby foods. Therefore, this work explored the life cycle environmental impacts of different ready-made baby foods, both at the level of individual meals and their combinations within a weekly menu. Twelve different meals were considered, based on baby food products available on the UK market, spanning breakfast, lunch and dessert. Menus following four different diets – omnivorous, vegetarian, pescatarian and dairy-free – were also evaluated. The results showed that, on average, lunch meals had the highest impacts and desserts the lowest. Breakfast has either intermediate (wet porridge) or low (dry porridge) impacts. Among the lunch meals, spaghetti Bolognese and salmon risotto had the highest impacts and among the desserts, strawberry, raspberry and banana as well as apple, pear and banana purees had the lowest. The key hotspots across the meals were raw materials and packaging. Meals with more meat and cream were found to have higher impacts. Manufacturing also played a significant role for global warming potential as well as depletion of fossil resources and the ozone layer due to the fossil fuels used in the process. When the impacts were analysed per mass of baby food consumed weekly, the dairy-free diet had higher impacts than the other three, but the difference among them was relatively small. The trends changed when nutritional value was taken into account, with the dairy-free diet exhibiting considerably higher impacts per unit of energy content. In that case, the pescatarian diet became the best option for most impacts. There was little difference between the omnivore and vegetarian diets. It is expected that these results will be of interest to baby food manufacturers and consumers, helping them to make more informed manufacturing and purchasing decisions

Assessing topical treatment interventions on Scottish salmon farms using a sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) population model

At a time when sea lice control is a major issue for salmon aquaculture worldwide it has become imperative that scant veterinary medicinal resources for the treatment of fish on farms should be conserved and used effectively. This communication reports the use of the mathematical simulation model SLiDESim to investigate how best to administer cypermethrin bath treatments on Scottish salmon (Salmon salar L.) farms to control the challenge from lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) during a two-year production cycle. It was found that these topical treatments are most effective when administered in pairs approximately six weeks apart. Timing of treatment is critical and depends on the number of treatments administered over the production cycle. For 4, 5 or 6 treatments during a two-year production cycle, SLiDESim indicated that the first pair of treatments is best initiated in autumn of the first year of production with the second pair starting between 13 and 18 weeks later. This strategy can produce considerable gains in the predicted reduction of sea lice levels when compared with those historically observed when using cypermethrin on Scottish farms. The effects of altered efficacy were also explored using the model and indicate that even a moderate reduction in treatment efficacy can have considerable impacts on lice control over a production cycle. The SLiDESim computer model provides a framework to explore the more efficient use of veterinary treatments for the control of sea lice on salmon farms

Cost Structure and Vertical Integration between Farming and Processing

In several food-producing sectors, we observe vertical integration between the farming and processing stages. The salmon industry, which has motivated this paper, has seen a rise in large vertically integrated companies over the last decade, with direct ownership of production activities including hatcheries, fish processing and exporting. Both the farming and processing stages have become more capital intensive, which has led to a steeper U-shaped average cost (AC) curve. In this paper we present a theoretical link between this technological shift and vertical integration: in a repeated game model of relational contracting, we show that when the AC curve is sufficiently steep, then processors and farmers are more likely to vertically integrate. The reason is that steep AC curves make it costly to deviate from the optimal production scale, which in turn makes processors more vulnerable to hold-up and opportunistic behaviours from its suppliers. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2008 The Agricultural Economics Society.