What Is a Life Cycle Assessment? Understanding LCA for Agricultural Operations
Life cycle assessments provide the methodological foundation for measuring environmental impact. Understanding LCA helps you speak the language of sustainability reporting.
Every process and act of consumption affects resources and the environment. Understanding and evaluating these processes is challenging because of the various influencing factors and uncertainties involved. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) provide a framework for evaluating the environmental impact of a product, process, or activity throughout its entire lifecycle—from creation to end of life.
For agricultural operations, LCA methodology matters because it underlies much of modern sustainability reporting. When buyers ask about your carbon footprint, when certifications require impact documentation, when you want to understand where your environmental burden actually comes from—LCA provides the systematic approach.
What LCA Actually Measures
The concept of life cycle assessment evolved in the 1960s and has been standardized since. It's gone by many names: eco-balancing, resource and environment profile analysis, environmental profiling, cradle-to-grave analysis.
The approach has centralized around frameworks from ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and SETAC (Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry). These standards provide the methodology that makes LCA results comparable across studies and organizations.
LCAs are generally conducted for three purposes:
Comparing and evaluating alternative products, processes, or services
Evaluating alternative lifecycles for a product, process, or service
Identifying lifecycle stages where the greatest improvements can be made
The Four Phases of LCA
Phase 1: Goal and Scope Definition
Defining purpose and scope is the first step. This establishes the boundaries of the assessment—without clear boundaries, scope creep undermines results.
Key elements to define:
Expected outcome: What decision will this assessment inform?
System boundaries: What's included and excluded?
Functional unit: The unit of measurement (e.g., kg of product, hectare of land, unit of output)
The functional unit is particularly important—it's what allows comparison between different products or processes. For agricultural products, this might be emissions per kilogram of output, water use per hectare, or energy per unit of production.
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Phase 2: Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
The inventory phase is the most time and resource-intensive. It requires in-depth accounting of all inputs and outputs across the defined system boundary.
Common inputs to track:
Energy consumption by type and source
Water use
Raw materials and purchased inputs
Common outputs to track:
Products and co-products
Emissions to air, water, and soil
Waste streams
If data is available from LCA databases, this process becomes less intensive. However, database data is typically generic—accommodations should be made for your specific context.
Phase 3: Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)
The impact assessment translates inventory data into environmental impact categories. Each inventory flow is assigned to an impact category based on its environmental effect.
The process typically involves:
Classification: Grouping data into common impact categories
Characterization: Modeling how inventory flows affect environmental outcomes (e.g., how different greenhouse gases contribute to global warming)
Normalization: Creating comparable scales across different impact categories
Valuation: Weighting the relative importance of different environmental burdens
Through characterization, inventory results become comparable using equivalency factors—this is how different activities get converted to "CO2 equivalents" or similar standardized metrics.
Phase 4: Interpretation
The final phase examines findings and draws conclusions. If the process has been systematic and aligned with the original scope and objectives, conclusions can drive intelligent decision-making.
Good interpretation identifies:
Significant issues and hotspots
Data quality limitations
Completeness and consistency of results
Conclusions and recommendations
Why LCA Matters for Agricultural Operations
You probably won't conduct a formal LCA of your operation—full assessments require significant expertise and resources. But understanding LCA methodology helps you:
Speak the language: When buyers or certifiers reference "life cycle impacts" or "cradle-to-gate emissions," you understand what they mean
Collect the right data: LCA frameworks identify what inputs and outputs matter for environmental accounting
Interpret results: When you see environmental impact data, you understand how it was derived and what its limitations might be
Identify improvement opportunities: LCA thinking helps you find where in your operation the biggest environmental gains are possible
Connection to Sustainability Reporting
Modern sustainability reporting frameworks—including those your buyers use for Scope 3 reporting—build on LCA methodology. The product carbon footprints, water footprints, and environmental impact data that supply chains increasingly request are essentially simplified LCA outputs.
This is why LCA understanding sits within Stack 1. Building your baseline measurement systems with LCA principles in mind ensures your data can feed into the reporting frameworks that matter for market access.
Ready to build your measurement foundation?
Understanding LCA methodology is part of Stack 1 in the Five Stacks Framework—knowing the external landscape and measurement frameworks you're operating in.
Stack 1 focuses on building defensible baseline data for core sustainability metrics. With LCA-informed measurement systems, your data speaks the language that buyers, certifiers, and reporting frameworks require.