An approach to achieve overall farm feed efficiency in pig production: environmental evaluation through individual life cycle assessment

Abstract

Purpose Use a holistic individual life cycle assessment (LCA) to investigate possible mitigation of environmental impacts through optimisation of overall farm feed efficiency by combining animal selection for feed efficiency and formulation of diets with minimum environmental impacts tailored to pig nutritional requirements. Methods A linear multi-objective optimisation method was used to combine diet optimisation tailored to meet the representative nutritional requirements of genetic lines with environmental optimisation of the environmental impacts of the diet. Environmental optimisation was obtained by weighting the environmental impacts of the diet in a single environmental impact score. An individual trait-based LCA model with a cradle-to-farm-gate system boundary and functional unit of 1 kg live pig at the farm gate was applied to genetic lines selected for high (LRFI, high feed efficient line) and low (HRFI, low feed efficient line) feed efficiency data. The production traits of each individual animal in response to the optimised diets were simulated with InraPorc® and imported into the individual LCA model to assess global warming potential (GWP), terrestrial acidification potential (AP), freshwater eutrophication potential (EP), and land occupation (LO) of the overall farm feed efficiency approach. Results and discussion Integrating selection for feed efficiency, nutritional requirements of genetic lines (HRFI and LRFI) and environmental diet optimisation resulted in overall mitigation of environmental impacts. Compared to the conventional diet, the environmental score of the optimised tailored diets was reduced by 5.8% and 5.2% for LRFI and HRFI lines, respectively. At the general production system level, the environmental impacts decreased by an average of 4.2% for LRFI and 3.8% for HRFI lines compared to environmental impacts of the lines fed the conventional diet (P < 0.05). The HRFI line with its optimised tailored diet had fewer impacts than the LRFI line with the conventional diet, except for EP. Individual LCA revealed high correlations between environmental impacts and feed efficiency and protein deposition traits. Conclusions Implementation of overall farm feed efficiency would effectively mitigate environmental impacts. A holistic economic evaluation of the resulting trade-off between diet costs and pig performances is now needed to design a comprehensive tool to orientate selection and formulation decisions for sustainable pig production systems.

A Critical Review on the Use of Shallow Geothermal Energy Systems for Heating and Cooling Purposes

“…Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a method for studying the environmental impacts and environmental aspects of a product or system during its life cycle [110]. LCA is required for assessing GSHPs' potential environmental issues and sustainability over its lifetime.…”

Identifying cattle with superior growth feed efficiency through their natural 15N abundance and plasma urea concentration: A meta-analysis

“…This finding suggests that Δ 15 Nanimal-diet (and to a much lesser extent plasma urea) could be used within a herd to form groups of animals for precision feeding strategies, in such a way that the highest and lowest individuals in terms of Δ 15 Nanimal-diet could be assigned to receive diets with, for example, lower and higher CP content, respectively. In this regard, economic and environmental simulations in pigs genetically divergent for RFI demonstrated that high and low CP diets were more suitable for efficient and inefficient animals, respectively, than a common standard CP diet (Soleimani et al, 2021). Alternatively, the group of animals with the highest Δ 15 Nanimal-diet values (i.e.…”

The Influence of Farm Characteristics and Feed Compositions on the Environmental Impact of Pig Production in Flanders: Productivity, Energy Use and Protein Choices Are Key

“…As described above, feed compositions are determined by linear programming based on availability and price on the market, respecting animal-specific minima and maxima concerning energy needs, proteins, minerals and vitamins. For sure, there are possibilities to extend the linear programming concept to include the minimization of environmental impact indictors [15,19], which would lead to interesting potential new feed formulations. The possibilities in practice will need to be assessed, for example, by an appropriate label that can communicate which efforts have been made.…”

“…Multiple studies have investigated the environmental impact of pig production [8,[16][17][18], including studies that particularly focus on the environmental impact of feed production [14,15,19,20]. While some of these studies include a comparison of different systems, for example between countries [16] or between different production systems [8,18,20], they do not consider variability in system characteristics between individual pig production farms, which also differ within countries and production systems.…”