Livestock feed production needs to prioritise a shift towards “local, circular and soilless protein sources,” according to the authors of a major piece of policy analysis on global feed sustainability.
Pressures have increased to find more sustainable feed solutions, with feed-food land use competition and geopolitical issues such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict adding urgency to moves to shift away from the use of soy and oilseed crops to feed animals, wrote the researchers in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
Among the different alternatives to feed ‘business as usual’, such as cultivating seaweeds, cellular proteins or insect farming, circular agriculture sources, such as generating protein feeds from food waste and industry by-products may have the higher environmental benefits, they said. They pointed to the fact that these approaches require the use of no arable land and reduce the amount of land required for waste disposal. However, there are concerns in society about possible food safety risks associated with such options.
Four routes to success?
They proposed four new policy pathways to effectively contribute to Sustainable Development Goals in the feed industry. These include decoupling feed production from fossil use by shifting to alternatives that rely on renewable energy and developing alternative proteins strategies below national level, to account for variable costs, incentives and labour availability.
They also called for better engagement around the social acceptability of feeds from circular sources, and consideration of the concerns of various groups to ensure there are no unintended consequences of their wide application. Finally, they highlighted a need for enhancements to feed and food safety, with facility for early detection of contamination risks that consider emerging feed and food security threats such as the impact of climate change and storage conditions.
Trade-offs inevitable
“Immediate action is required to reshape the global livestock feed market and enhance its future resilience to environmental, macro-economic and geopolitical instabilities,” they wrote.
However, they warned that there is “no silver bullet” free from trade-offs between the three pillars of sustainability — environment, social and economic — identified by the United Nations.
“Anticipatory policies should be in place to compensate for losses through such trade-offs and to scope the future of the livestock sector beyond the time horizon suggested by the current sustainability agendas,” they stressed.
With 2030, the target year of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, looming, a practical vision of how a transformation towards alternative feeds serves the broader regenerative farming agenda is needed, they added, to bring about “clear guidelines for a more sustainable agri-food sector”.
