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This paper aims to demonstrate methods that sustainability-conscious brands can use to include their primary producers in the measurement and reporting of the environment and sustainability performance of their supply chains. It explores three questions: How can farm businesses provide information required in sustainability reporting? What are the challenges and opportunities experienced in preparing and presenting the information? What future research and policy instruments might be needed to resolve these issues.

This study identifies and describes methods to provide the farm-level information needed for environmental performance and sustainability reporting frameworks. It demonstrates them by compiling natural capital accounts and environmental performance information for two wool producers in the grassy woodland biome of Eastern Australia; the contrasting history and management of these producers would be expected to result in different environmental performances.

The authors demonstrated an approach to NC accounting that is suitable for including primary producers in environmental performance reporting of supply chains and that can communicate whether individual producers are sustaining, improving or degrading their NC. Measurements suitable for informing farm management and for the estimation of supply chain performance can simultaneously produce information useful for aggregation to regional and national assessments.

The methods used should assist sustainability-conscious supply chains to more accurately assess the environmental performance of their primary producers and to use these assessments in selective sourcing strategies to improve supply chain performance. Empirical measures of environmental performance and natural capital have the potential to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of sustainability accounting frameworks in inducing businesses to reduce their environmental impacts and improve the condition of the natural capital they depend on.

Two significant social implications exist for the inclusion of primary producers in the sustainability and environmental performance reporting of supply chains. Firstly, it presently takes considerable time and expense for producers to prepare this information. Governments and members of the supply chain should acknowledge the value of this information to their organisations and consider sharing some of the cost of its preparation with primary producers. Secondly, the “additionality” requirement commonly present in existing frameworks may perversely exclude already high-performing producers from being recognised. The methods proposed in this paper provide a way to resolve this.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to describe detailed methods of collecting data for natural capital accounting and environmental performance reporting for individual farms and the first to compile the information and present it in a manner coherent with the Kering EP&L and the UN SEEA EA. The authors believe that this will make a significant contribution to the development of fair and standardised ways of measuring individual farm performance and the performance of food, beverage and apparel supply chains.

This study comprehensively depicts the state of the art on sustainability research in the meat supply chain to advance the debate on challenges and issues associated with developing sustainable supply chain management practices.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review of 333 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and organized the extant literature into five areas of supply chain management practices: strategic orientation, continuity, collaboration, risk management, and proactivity.

Since 2016, the meat supply chain has received increasing scholarly attention. The literature shows the diffusion of highly heterogeneous sustainability practices related to multiple management areas and levels of analysis (institutional, industry, firm). The need for integrated, multilevel initiatives involving different stakeholders becomes increasingly crucial to the transition towards more sustainable meat supply chains.

This study highlights the importance of regulatory and stakeholder pressures in the sustainability transition. Beyond setting regulatory requirements, policymakers may facilitate the establishment of collaborations within the meat supply chain and foster the development of support services that help firms to integrate sustainability in their business models. The review also alerts entrepreneurs and managers to the benefits from cooperating with their supply chain partners to navigate the industry transition and thus more effectively respond to the demands of stakeholders and to the increasing customers’ awareness of sustainability issues.

This study is the first to systematize the corpus of knowledge on the sustainability of the meat supply chain by adopting a comprehensive approach to analyze relevant management and agriculture literature.