Energy and protein feed-to-food conversion efficiencies in the US and potential food security gains from dietary changes

Abstract

Feeding a growing population while minimizing environmental degradation is a global challenge requiring thoroughly rethinking food production and consumption. Dietary choices control food availability and natural resource demands. In particular, reducing or avoiding consumption of low production efficiency animal-based products can spare resources that can then yield more food. In quantifying the potential food gains of specific dietary shifts, most earlier research focused on calories, with less attention to other important nutrients, notably protein. Moreover, despite the well-known environmental burdens of livestock, only a handful of national level feed-to-food conversion efficiency estimates of dairy, beef, poultry, pork, and eggs exist. Yet such high level estimates are essential for reducing diet related environmental impacts and identifying optimal food gain paths. Here we quantify caloric and protein conversion efficiencies for US livestock categories. We then use these efficiencies to calculate the food availability gains expected from replacing beef in the US diet with poultry, a more efficient meat, and a plant-based alternative. Averaged over all categories, caloric and protein efficiencies are 7%-8%. At 3% in both metrics, beef is by far the least efficient. We find that reallocating the agricultural land used for beef feed to poultry feed production can meet the caloric and protein demands of ≈120 and ≈140 million additional people consuming the mean American diet, respectively, roughly 40% of current US population.

Energy Assessment of Pastoral Dairy Goat Husbandry from an Agroecological Economics Perspective. A Case Study in Andalusia (Spain)

“…These figures confirm the high energy cost of human food based on animal proteins. In the United States, Shepon et al [38] have estimated an energy efficiency of 17% in the use of energy to feed livestock and produce milk, a figure that is below those obtained for the three cases analyzed here.…”

“…The energy accounting of manure is, in addition, a measure of the potential environmental benefit of incorporating biomass to the agroecosystem. The use of natural pastoralism avoids the energy costs associated with the production of livestock feed [38], in addition to reducing pressure on the cropland.…”

Current global food production is sufficient to meet human nutritional needs in 2050 provided there is radical societal adaptation

“…This 12% conversion rate of plant material to meat and dairy products is in line with previous estimates (Godfray et al, 2010;Herrero and Thornton, 2013;Tilman and Clark, 2013). However, a recent analysis estimated an overall 7% conversion efficiency of plant to meat and dairy calories in the USA (Shepon et al, 2016). Food eaten by wild-caught fish is not included in our analysis, but if it were it would slightly reduce our estimate of this conversion rate, but not below 11%.…”

Novel amoxicillin nanoparticles formulated as sustained release delivery system for poultry use

“…Feeding a growing population while minimizing environmental disruption is a global problem requiring thoroughly rethinking food production and consumption. Dietary choices control food availability and natural resource demands (Shepon, Eshel, Noor, & Milo, ). In this context, broiler meat is popular due to the fact that it is cheaper and more versatile and is realized to give more health benefits than red meat.…”