Abstract
PurposeUse 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.MethodsA 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 discussionIntegrating 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.ConclusionsImplementation 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.
Highlights
The original online version of this article was revised due to an error in figure 4.Communicated by Thomas Jan Nemecek.Improving feed efficiency is a major objective to enhance pig production sustainability in terms of economy and environment
The least environmental impact score diet which satisfies the representative requirements of each line at a cost less than 110% of that of the least cost diet was retained as the optimised tailored diet for the corresponding line
Smaller quantities of synthetic amino acids (AA) were incorporated in the low residual feed intake (LRFI) optimised tailored diet (L-tryptophan and DL-methionine), whereas L-lysine was higher in this diet
Summary
The original online version of this article was revised due to an error in figure 4.Communicated by Thomas Jan Nemecek.Improving feed efficiency is a major objective to enhance pig production sustainability in terms of economy and environment. The original online version of this article was revised due to an error in figure 4. Improving feed efficiency is a major objective to enhance pig production sustainability in terms of economy and environment. The main environmental impacts of pig production originate from feed production (Opio et al 2013) and from manure excretion and emissions during pig farming The improvement in the main environmental burden sources can be obtained through reduction in feed intakes, and supply of nutrients tailored to the animal requirements, to achieve better use of lower quantities of feed by the animals. Feed efficiency, which is usually expressed as its inverse, feed conversion
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