View From Europe


By Colin Ley


Listen to your customers and try not to feel irrelevant Feed industry leaders are due to meet in Brussels in early June to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of FEFAC, the European Feed Manufacturers’ Federation, whose founding in 1959 was led by the national compound feed associations of France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. While the event will quite rightly honour the many achievements of


the past six decades, it’s the challenge of the future that is more likely to dominate proceedings, both during the official conference sessions and in the bars and dining rooms of central Brussels, especially those surrounding the Royal Art & History Museum which is the venue for this great occasion. Although we all love to talk about how it used to be in the earlier


days of our different careers, it’s the future that usually concentrates the mind. For FEFAC’s celebrating members that will mean focusing on how to ensure that the organisation’s seventh decade embraces the dual challenge of responsibly sourcing plant proteins and climate change mitigation. It’s an appropriate choice of subjects, given the current media


attention being given to climate change protests, as a result of which the pressure on businesses to respond accordingly has surely never been greater. While opinions will no doubt differ on the methods which various protestors have chosen to make their point in recent weeks, the message they’ve been proclaiming has become unavoidable. Not that we’re exactly discovering climate change mitigation and


responsible sourcing for the first time, of course. FEFAC already has its own Vision 2030 programme in place, detailing the compound feed industry’s commitment to ‘provide meaningful and practical solutions to address societal issues’. Introduced in 2016, Vision 2030 fully embraces climate change and the crucial importance to producers and consumers alike of basing future feed output on safe, sound and sustainable raw materials. To quote FEFAC President, Nick Major, on the issue, therefore,


the Brussels anniversary event is the perfect moment to carry out our sector’s ‘fitness check’ concerning the industry’s ability to deliver new tools to an EU livestock sector which continues to face an ever-changing and hugely demanding societal challenge. Now, I know we’re not going to take to the streets, block transport


systems or prevent the London stock exchange from opening, in order to get our message across. All the same, it’s important to keep telling consumers what we have been doing as an industry over the past 60 years to improve our product sourcing and processing systems and what is being done now by businesses to further advance the performance and efficiency of feed production. We are definitely responding to emerging climate change and sustainability concerns and we need to shout a bit louder about that in


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the weeks and months ahead. You can be sure there will be plenty of negative product and industry messages out there for people to absorb as 2019 unfolds, so let’s balance the debate as much as can. By the way, happy anniversary FEFAC, you deserve to celebrate.


Breeding advances deliver climate change benefits In the midst of all the negative climate change opinions being voiced almost daily on the role farm animals play in relation to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, I am pleased to be able to bring a little balance to the issue by highlighting a set of new research findings released by a study team at Wageningen Livestock Research in The Netherlands. Having studied the impact of farm livestock breeding improvements


in relation to broilers, laying hens, pigs and dairy cattle, the Wageningen team concluded that breeding advances are reducing the environmental impact of animal products across the researched species by about 1% a year. They also stated that the breeding-based climate change benefits


they’ve identified are due largely to improving levels of efficiency in relation to both livestock feed production and animal performance and that the 1% per year advance is being achieved without the breeding programmes they studied including any specific selection for environmental traits. In short, their conclusion is that increasing feed production and


animal performance efficiency, due to breeding progress, leads to lower environmental impact. In looking at broilers, laying hens and, to a minor extent, pigs, the


Dutch team focused on GHG emissions, as linked to feed production impacts. For dairy cattle, the researchers concentrated on enteric methane emissions and the role they play as a contributor to GHG emissions. Their conclusion on the effect of breeding advances on pigs, based


on a ‘well-controlled study with two diets and animals divided by sex’, is that GHG emissions decreased for better-bred pigs in the growing- fattening phase while nitrogen and phosphorus efficiency increased. It was also found that boars have a lower environmental impact than gilts.


For dairy cattle, the results show that while methane production per


cow per day has increased in response to current breeding goals, the level of methane intensity, as measured according to methane production per kg milk, is decreasing. The team’s final point, meanwhile, relating to observations on laying


hens, does rather raise more questions than answers. Having examined the impact of breeding advances in both white


and brown hens, for example, the conclusion was reached that white hens have a lower GHG impact than brown hens. It was also revealed that breeding improvements over the past 10 years have been moving faster with white hens than with brown. Don’t worry, someone, somewhere will be trying to find the answer


to the question you’re now asking, and I’ll tell you what they discover as soon as let me know.


Consumers remain committed to animal protein While I’m dealing with upbeat, positive stories, the latest results from a survey initiated by Cargill definitely rate a mention. The company, which has been talking to consumers in the US,


Comment section is sponsored by Compound Feed Engineering Ltd www.cfegroup.com


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