Absolutely.
The study we did on the comparative environmental impact assessment of our supply chain was partly to help inform the discussion around how moving to more regionalized, smaller-scale processing means we could move more meat than we do live animals. We can put more meat in a trailer than we can live animals.
Plus, when you move long distances, you have “shrink”. They've consumed resources that disappear in transport because of the stress, and you need to feed them again, so you double that 10% of resources into the animal.
Yes, I absolutely agree: It wouldn't just mitigate the need to transport live animals, but our study suggests that by improving regional processing capacity, we could reduce our carbon footprint strictly from trucks and shrink by 14%.