The Pork Checkoff announces the release of a new software tool for pork producers – the Live Swine Carbon Footprint Calculator. Developed with the technical expertise of the University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center, the user-friendly application allows producers to input their on-farm data from the sow or grow-finish side of production to compute the carbon footprint of an entire barn of pigs from breeding to market.

Roy Henry, a pork producer from Longford, Kansas, and member of the National Pork Board, says – the calculator will create a benchmark of a barn’s carbon footprint that producers can use to help make production decisions to improve efficiencies and achieve a lower overall footprint. Henry says – this tool truly offers us an innovation that can help guide our management practices.

Randy Spronk, a producer from Edgerton, Minnesota, who serves on the Checkoff’s environmental committee, was one of the first to test the carbon footprint calculator. He was impressed by its ease of use and straightforward output. According to Spronk, – with your production data available to enter into the calculator, it only takes a few minutes to determine your barn’s carbon footprint and to visually see what the biggest contributors to it are. From there, you can begin thinking how you might make changes to increase on-farm efficiencies and reduce your baseline footprint.