Integrating LCA with biochemistry investigations and sensory analysis to valorise Sardinian sheep cheese

Sardinia (Italy) is the most important EU region for sheep milk production, with more than 3.2 million ewes ? about 3.5% of the EU total (EUROSTAT, 2012) ? and a milk production of about 330.000 t year-1 (Osservatorio Regionale per l'Agricoltura, 2012), which represents more than 12% of the total European production (EUROSTAT, 2012). Basically, the whole Sardinian sheep milk production is addressed to handcraft or industrial cheese manufacturing. Sardinian dairy sheep farming systems are considered to be pasture-based and quite extensive but a few studies have been conducted in order to assess their environmental implications with a life cycle approach. The optimization of environmental performances could be a crucial factor to improve competitiveness of sheep farming, in particular when located in marginal lands. Therefore, it is essential to analyse the environmental impacts of these livestock systems and to identify environmentally sound business strategies linked to this approach. For this purpose the following preliminaries studies were carried out: i) an LCA, to compare the environmental impacts of sheep milk production from three dairy farms in Sardinia, characterized by different input levels; ii) a sensory evaluation and a consumer test of an handcraft cheese produced using milk from the same three dairy farms, to highlight possible different sensory perceptions and expectation related to the sheep farming system; iii) nutritional quality and traceability biochemistry investigations, to compare the effect of the three sheep farming systems on the nutritional qualities of milk and sheep's cheese and in order to explore the possibility of trace the production chain through biomarker identification. The integration of the environmental impact assessment of each sheep milk production system, the sensory perception and hedonic opinion of cheeses, and the biochemistry characterization of both milk and cheeses can provide important scientific information on the effect of sheep farming system on cheese's environmental and organoleptic qualities and customer satisfaction.