The value of food products from mixed crop-livestock systems: environmental benefits and regional environmental carrying capacity

ABSTRACT

Food products from mixed crop-livestock systems is a market-based solution to reduce environmental impacts of livestock worldwide. However, widespread promotion of mixed systems of recycling agriculture depends on consumers’ acceptance of its food products. In this paper, we examine consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for several attributes of pork products, and develop consumer classes based on preferences. Using a choice experiment among 893 Chinese consumers, our results show that consumers are willing to pay a premium for pork with mixed crop-livestock systems claim. In addition, a positive WTP is also detected for different environmental carrying capacity, environmental benefits and quality certifications. We use latent class analysis to identify heterogeneous consumers into five classes: namely balanced thinking, price sensitive, quality preferred, environmental benefits conscious and ecology conscious consumers. Further policies and interventions aimed at promoting the market-oriented operation of mixed crop-livestock systems of recycling agriculture, based on regional environmental carrying capacity, different dimensions of environmental benefits and quality improvement of food products, will be effective.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed crop-livestock systems
• environmental carrying capacity
• food consumption
• choice experiment
• latent class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ http://www.moa.gov.cn/govpublic/SCYJJXXS/202109/t20210917_6376737.htm.

² Admittedly, negative impacts on soil and negative impacts on water are interrelated in agriculture. For instance, accumulation of nutrition excess in soil indirectly causes water pollution. However, livestock production can have a direct negative impact on water, and this direct impact is more severe than the indirect impact. Previous studies have shown that due to the lack of livestock manure treatment facilities in many farms, excreta or waste water from livestock production get into streams can lead to eutrophication of surface water, resulting in direct pollution of the water quality (Gerber et al. 2005; Wang et al. 2021). The State Council of the People’s Republic of China issued the “Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution”, which mentioned that livestock farms need treat and utilize manure sewage to prevent direct water pollution. This paper thus focuses on the direct impact of pig production on air, water and soil.

³ Overload zone includes Beijing, Zhejiang and other 12 provinces and province-level municipalities; balance zone includes Shandong, Jiangsu and other 7 provinces and province-level municipalities; potential zone includes Hebei, Shanxi and other 10 provinces.

⁴ The majority of studies have used normal and lognormal distributions to represent the distribution of random parameters in mixed logit models. However, Train (2016) introduces a new way of specifying the distribution of random parameters using flexible forms such as polynomials, splines, and step functions. Therefore, we report each utility parameter under the specification of polynomials, step functions, and splines (see Appendix C). Since the results of the flexible models show little difference from those of the normal distribution, we only present the results of the normal models in the main text for simplicity..

⁵ Appendix D reports the mean and 95% confidence intervals of the WTP measures obtained from the model in preference space..

⁶ % premium calculated according to the average price for pork hindquarters in yuan per 500 g (21.36 yuan/500 g) in China in June 2021 (Ministry of Commerce, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [20BGL177], the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD).