SUSFEED - Sustainable feed design applying circular economy principles: the case former food in pig nutrition

In developing countries, as a result of increasing per capita GDP (Tilman et al., 2011; FAOSTAT, 2017), we are observing shifts in diets towards increasing consumption of animal products (Pimentel et al., 2008). An example of shifting diet is represented by China, where during the last two decades’ demand for and consumption of animal origin has grown rapidly. Public debates and scientific literature principally focused on how these habits affect the amount of required limited resources, addressing those changes as unsustainable, but which can be the effects of a shift in animal diets? SUS-Feed is a projects founded by Fondazione Cariplo aims at evaluating the effects of substituting conventional cereals with former food products in pig’s diets, by addressing its impacts on growth performance, gut health, pig wellbeing, as well as its sustainability assessment and its implications in natural resources saving. In fact, among others, pigs represent an interesting case study, providing 36% of total meat production (113Mtons worldwide) and 51% of energy from animal products (124kcal/cap/day – global average) (FAOSTAT, 2017).

Pig diet is mainly composed by soybeans and maize, whose harvested area worldwide are rapidly exploding, accounting for 187Mha and 111Mha for maize and soybean in 2013 respectively, creating environmental problems such as water scarcity, deforestation, pollution, fires. In order to assess the potential positive feedbacks of such conversion on natural resources, focus of our presentation, a spatial distributed physically based model is applied in order to quantify water and land saving by introducing former food products and the consequent positive feedback on water scarcity, water pollution and deforestation.