In a post-Brexit context,
the UK has an opportunity to improve its protein autonomy
By Nicolas Martin, Herman Claassen and William Lambert, Ajinomoto Animal Nutrition Europe With Brexit coming fully into force from the 1st January onwards,
the year 2021 will certainly be a particularly significant year for the feed and livestock industry in the UK. Like in continental Europe, modern livestock production in the UK is facing numerous sustainability challenges such as climate change, air quality (acidification) and water quality (eutrophication). The challenges to overcome are mainly driven by consumer demands, societal expectations and stakeholders in the market chain willing to improve their practices. What will change with Brexit is that the policy answer to these
challenges will be more and more UK specific. The UK Environment Bill and the Roadmap to better, fairer farming systems published in November have set the scene. The farmers will be rewarded with public money for the achievement of targets such as reduced environmental impact. More transparency will also be required, especially regarding deforestation for the purpose of agricultural commodities. Animal feed, being one of the main drivers of performance and
nutrient efficiency, is a key parameter to consider when improving environmental performance of livestock production. Feed is a major contributor to climate change, representing between 60 and 75% of the carbon footprint of eggs and broilers respectively. Feed also contributes to eutrophication and acidification, but to a lesser extent (See Figure1). Feed production and manure management are different life cycle
stages of livestock products, contributing to different environmental impacts. For an accurate and relevant assessment of the environmental
Figure 1: Contribution to impact on Climate change, Eutrophication and Acidifcation.
impact of livestock products, it is important to consider the different steps of the production. A life cycle approach (LCA) is therefore required.
Sustainability benefit of dietary protein reduction in livestock can be made visible by implementing a life- cycle assessment approach Reducing the dietary crude protein (CP) while balancing the indispensable amino acids (AA), is a nutritional approach that has many benefits. It allows the reduction of protein rich ingredients (e.g. soybean meal) that are highly susceptible to land use change with a reduction of nitrogen related molecule (N, NH3
and N2 O) excretion
by the animal in the manure. Therefore, it can address the 3 main impact categories: global warming potential, eutrophication and acidification. It is possible to quantify the effect of this strategy in broiler and in swine, using a meta-analytical approach: - Reducing dietary crude protein of broiler & grower pig diets by 1%-point, lead to a decreased soybean meal utilization: -35 kg in broiler (blue line) & - 39 kg in swine (red line) per ton of feed (See Figure 2). An interaction was found between CP effect and species, with significantly larger decrease of SBM in swine. In a European context, it also means savings of 101 kg of
-
CO2-eq per ton of compound feed, independent of species (See Figure 2) using GFLI 2019 database for raw materials and EcoAlim 2016 for micro-ingredients.
A theoretical extrapolation of those results obtained by meta-analysis
can be made to the whole feed production of Great Britain, using official figures from 2019. The savings in terms of SBM imports are 181,000T and 835,000T of CO2 can be saved by applying a reduction of dietary crude protein by 1%-point in all monogastric diets (See Table 1).
Table 1: Carbon dioxide and soybean meal savings when reducing dietary crude protein by 1% point in all pig and poultry diets in Great Britain. Figures of pig & poultry feed and SBM are courtesy of Ryan Mounsey, Feed Compounder.
‘000 Tonnes Total Pig Feed
Source: Méda et al., 2019 (ESPN); acknowledgement to INRA for sharing
Total Poultry Feed Total SBM Used CO2 Savings SBM Savings
2019 1928 6341 1151 835 181
FEED COMPOUNDER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 PAGE 45
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