Sustainable swine feeding programs require the convergence of multiple dimensions of circular agriculture and food systems with One Health

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🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive framework for integrating circular economy and One Health in swine production, useful for interdisciplinary research on sustainable livestock systems.

🏢実務担当者:Offers practical strategies for feed formulation and nutrient management that can reduce environmental footprint and improve sustainability in pork production.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for policies that support circular agriculture, antimicrobial stewardship, and biosecurity to achieve sustainable food systems.

Sustainable pork production must evolve from a linear supply chain towards a circular system that integrates and optimizes multiple environmental, human and animal health, societal, and economic factors. Improving carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus utilization efficiency of pork production requires new approaches for sourcing feed ingredients, formulating diets, precision feeding, and upcycling nutrients from food waste streams. One Health, circular, and sustainable swine feeding strategies can provide complementary or synergistic benefits for optimizing nutrition-health-environment interactions but widespread implementation is needed. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and education is needed to develop and implement meaningful sustainability action plans in the global agriculture and food industry. Global agriculture and human food system is at a critical point for achieving future food security and sustainability because of destruction of soil, loss of biodiversity, degradation and pollution of water and land resources, and inefficient use, recovery, and recycling of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) which have exceeded Earth’s planetary boundaries (UN/DESA, 2021). Many interrelated but separate global initiatives, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and International Nitrogen Initiative; circular economy, food system, and agriculture models; regenerative agriculture approaches; and One Health goals provide guidance for improving the four major components of sustainability—human, social, economic, and environment. All of these initiatives indicate that we need to modify pork production systems to become more sustainable, with circularity of nutrients and One Health goals as core components of these more sustainable systems. To create meaningful improvements in pork production sustainability, we need to think differently by progressing from using multidisciplinary (use of knowledge from different independent disciplines) approaches towards interdisciplinary (coordinated analysis and synthesis of knowledge between disciplines) and transdisciplinary (transcends traditional boundaries by integrating environmental, social, and health sciences) approaches for solving complex sustainability problems. The current food and agriculture supply chains are inefficient because they function as linear models comprised of independent actors attempting to achieve the greatest economic benefits in an extraction–production–consumption–discard manner at significant environmental costs (Figure 1). Therefore, circular agriculture and food supply chain models need to be developed to 1) implement technologies and practices that minimize the use of finite (e.g., land and water) and destructive resources (e.g., antibiotics, synthetic fertilizer), 2) encourage use of regenerative resources (e.g., animal manure, cover crops), and 3) close nutrient loops that prevent these valuable natural resources from leaving the food system and recycling nutrients back into production of more products. Although the global feed industry has a long history of recovering and recycling raw materials from agro-industrial and biofuels processes for many decades (Coffey et al., 2016), an increased focus on processes of origination and level of direct competition with food production has been initiated by FEFAC (2022) to optimize the recovery and recycling of nutrients from food and biofuels by-products into animal feed. Sustainable pork production requires progressing from a linear supply chain toward a circular food system that integrates and optimizes environmental, animal, and human health. Pork production is the largest contributor to global meat production, and future consumer demand for pork is expected to increase (MacLeod et al., 2013). Although greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from global pork supply chains (9.5%) are substantially less than those from dairy (30.1%) and beef (35.3%) supply chains, emissions will continue to increase unless mitigation strategies are implemented. The greatest opportunity for reducing the environmental footprint of pork production is to focus on swine feed composition and production because it is the largest contributor and accounts for 55% to 75% of the climate change impacts, 70% to 90% of energy use, and 85% to 100% of land use attributed to pork production systems (MacLeod et al., 2013; Dourmad et al., 2014; FAO, 2018). Therefore, to prevent further environmental degradation and inefficiencies, pork production systems must adopt a more circular agriculture model (Velasco-Muñoz et al., 2021; Marinova and Bogueva, 2022) that not only focuses on increasing productivity (i.e., producing more pork with fewer resources), but also minimizes amounts of external inputs, closes nutrient loops, and minimizes the environmental footprint. One Health goals must also be achieved in sustainable pork production systems and have been used to evaluate and compare positive and negative impacts of future scenarios of improved pig production (Zira et al., 2022). One Health has been defined as “a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnections between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment” (CDC, 2022). Several key issues of One Health include antimicrobial resistance, animal diseases, food safety, food security, and environmental contamination (CDC, 2022) directly apply to sustainable pork production systems. Unfortunately, large amounts of antimicrobials continue to be used in pig production systems around the world (Lekagul et al., 2019). Deficiencies in implementation and enforcement of current U.S. regulatory policies on antimicrobial use in meat and poultry production have limited the effectiveness of interventions compared with those in Denmark and the Netherlands (Wallinga et al., 2022). Because antimicrobial resistance continues to be a major health threat to humans, animals (pigs), the environment, and sustainability (Aarestrup et al., 2008), more effort is needed to reduce antimicrobial use in food animal production globally. Sources and types of feed ingredients, along with feed formulation strategies, are major contributors to nutritional efficiency, biosecurity and health, environmental footprint, and cost in pork production systems, we need to develop a more holistic approach for designing swine feeding programs that integrate One Health-circular agriculture and food systems goals and approaches. The introduction of a foreign animal disease, such as African Swine Fever virus (ASFV), to a major pork producing country (e.g., United States) can have numerous detrimental effects on sustainability including huge economic losses (Carriquiry et al., 2020), inability to export pork, loss of livelihoods, environmental pollution from carcass disposal caused by high mortality or euthanasia, disruption of feed and pork supply chains and rural communities. Worldwide, the ongoing spread of ASFV, and the potential for transmission through feed ingredients has led to increased biosecurity concerns, which involve recommendations for sourcing imported feed ingredients from non-ASFV infected countries and avoiding the use of porcine derived by-products and food waste in swine diets (Shurson et al., 2021a). However, there is no surveillance system to determine the prevalence of contamination, nor the concentration or infectivity of ASFV or other swine viruses in the global feed industry, which has led to high uncertainty of possible risk of transmission (Shurson et al., 2021a). Because of this high uncertainty, and the discovery that various swine viruses can survive for varying lengths of time in different feed ingredient matrices (Dee et al., 2018), biosecurity protocols have begun to be developed and implemented along entire feed ingredient supply chains. Because of the perceived risk of ASFV and other foreign virus transmission through feed, demand for using rendered animal by-products and various sources of food waste in swine diets to reduce feed costs, improve nitrogen and phosphorus recovery, and reduce the environmental footprint has been diminished (Shurson, 2020). Furthermore, opportunities to capture nutritional efficiency, health, and environmental benefits of feeding spray dried animal plasma to weaned pigs (van Dijk et al., 2001) have not been fully realized because of perceived risks of transmission of swine viruses such as Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (Shurson et al., 2021b). Disruptions in “just-in-time” delivery of feed ingredients in global supply chains in recent years have led feed manufacturers to attempt to develop shorter supply chains that often include a desire to use more locally produced grains and oilseed meals compared with imported ingredients to provide a more reliable supply. Depending on the environmental impacts associated with using local feed ingredients, there may also be opportunities to feed diets with a lower environmental footprint to reduce overall environmental impacts of pig production (de Quelen et al., 2021), while also minimizing the risk of introducing foreign animal diseases. However, commodity traders play a key role in feed ingredient supply chain governance to ensure biosafe and deforestation-free sourcing of feed ingredients because indirect feed ingredient sourcing through intermediaries is a major problem for sustainable sourcing initiatives (zu Ermgassen et al., 2022). The Global Feed LCA Institute (GFLI; https://tools.blonkconsultants.nl/tool/16/) has developed a large feed ingredient database consisting of 18 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) environmental impact variables (Table 1) based on country of origin, and has the most widespread global application (European Union, USA, Canada). Although there are substantial differences in environmental impacts of feed ingredients at the natio

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfac077first seen 2026-08-02 17:58:25