BY-PRODUCTS ▶▶▶
From the US to India, turning food waste into milk
Continued strides are being made around the world to ensure human food waste and food processing by-products are not sent to landfills or incinerated but converted back into nutritious products by dairy cattle. From the US to India, we look deeper into food waste as cow nutrition.
BY TREENA HEIN, CORRESPONDENT E
In terms of total US waste, non-profit or- ganisation ReFED notes that across the US in 2019, 35% of all edible food was used, with a total value of US$ 408 billion and equating to 4% of total US greenhouse gas emissions.
26 ▶ ALL ABOUT FEED | Volume 29, No. 7, 2021
very industry on Earth is being encouraged to reduce its carbon footprint and do more with less. The global dairy industry has been active in this sphere for quite some time in several ways. One of them is through
using extensive amounts of food waste and food processing by-products in feed. According to a joint study published in 2019 by researchers at Kansas State and other US universities, rations for dairy cattle in North America at that point contained 20% to 30% food processing by-products. “Studies have demonstrated that diets with relatively high proportions of by-products can maintain or even improve ruminant performance,” state the authors. “Dairy cows fed by-products in place of cereals and pulses had similar dry matter intake and milk yield compared with cows fed conventional diets.”
According to Darigold, the marketing arm of the Northwest Dairy Association, dairy cows in the US consume about 306 million pounds of food waste daily. The association points to a study done at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, which identified up to 41 different sources of waste and by-products, including bakery waste, sweet corn cannery waste, vegetable trimmings, and much more, being fed to dairy cattle in the US Midwest. Indeed, some by-products, such as dried distillers grains, are now considered a common dairy cow feed component. The California Dairy Research Foundations states that dairy cow diets in that state can contain up to 40% food by-products such as almond hulls. Washington State’s 262,000 dairy cows consume 2.5 million kilogrammes of by-products every day. “Dairy farmers in [Washington] have used by-products that would otherwise end up in landfills for a long time and they are common in most dairy farms,” explains Kimmi Devaney, director of com- munications at the Dairy Farmers of Washington. “The exact byproduct feeds used depends on what is available in the area.” Devany points to a dairy in Enumclaw, WA that uses brewers grain and bakery waste, for example, and another near Royal City that uses potatoes rejected from food service and other vegetables unsuitable for grocery store sales. Other food waste used as feed in Washington includes apple processing waste and cottonseed.
PHOTO: LOOP
PHOTO: REFED
PHOTO: LOOP
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