Abstracts from the Proceedings of the 33rd Biennial Conference of the Australian Association of Animal Sciences

Abstract

During the career of Professor Eric Underwood, the feeding of livestock was closely linked to the availability of local resources. He solved problems by making the connections between the nutrient content of soil and livestock health, but while his research had global impact, I am sure he didn't foresee either the scale of the global feed trade or the environmental impact that livestock systems would have on the world 50 years on from his retirement in 1970.The livestock industry in 2020 is very different from what it was in 1970: global meat production is ~336 million tonnes per year (FAOSTAT averaged over 2016, 17 and 18) compared to the 92 million tonnes produced globally 50 years before. In Australia, the proportional contribution (by weight) of sheep and goat meat to total meat production has decreased from 35 to 16% over that time period and the annual import (mainly from Argentina) of soybean cake in 2016-18 averaged 743,000 tonnes out of a total of 895,000 tonnes of imported feed. Thus, even with Australia's land mass, feeding its livestock sector has a long-range footprint.As we know, livestock production also has global impact through the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere -the relationship also influenced by diet. Gerber et al. (2013) published an extensive assessment of the global contribution of emissions of GHGs from the livestock sector in 2013: beef and cattle milk production accounted for 41 and 20% of the emissions, while pig meat and poultry meat and eggs contributed 9 and 8% respectively. The expansion of pasture and feed crops into forests accounted for 9%.Awareness of the negative environmental impacts of livestock production systems started to become an important topic for research in the 1990s, as policies to limit the environmental impact of agriculture were introduced (e.g. Nitrate Vulnerable Zones in the European Union). The publication of Livestock's Long Shadow in 2006 raised global awareness of the long-range environmental impacts of livestock production systems and since then millions of dollars have been invested in quantifying those impacts. Looking at agricultural production simply through an environmental lens is not sufficient though, since global agreement to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals are to be delivered as a package and include 'zero hunger' and 'economic growth', both goals to which livestock production makes a significant contribution (Mehrabi et al. 2020).Research questions thus need to address the potential consequences on all goals, of pathways for making progress towards individual goals. Eric Underwood solved animal health problems through his research, providing solutions based on nutritional knowledge. In the last 50 years animal science has added greatly to that knowledge and supported the development and implementation of technologies which have facilitated the 3.5-fold increase in global meat production. Agriculture and trade policies have also played a significant ro...