By R. Euken, L. Schulz and C. Rice, along with collaborators G. Dahlke, M. Tokach, J. DeRouchey, E. Cortus, M. Sharara, L. Moody, D. Anderson, J. Dekkers, B. Ramirez, S. Matchan and L. Greiner

A life cycle assessment can be useful in reducing potential impact on the environment in addition to improving or maintaining profitability. Understanding where efficiency can be gained and the effects on the entire life cycle is a useful way for an industry to improve sustainability.

Sustainability focuses on various components such as social, human, environmental and business. A national four-year collaboration was developed by researchers at Iowa State University and is funded by the National Pork Board. The collaboration consists of multiple universities and industry partners to better understand pork production and sustainability by utilizing the life cycle assessment of nutrients. The life cycle of nutrients from pig to manure to crop to feed and back to pig will be evaluated in this project.

While many of us focus on the pigs and the feed they eat, this is only one part of the pork production life cycle. The nutrients consumed and utilized by the pigs are transformed into nutritious protein. Nutrients in swine feed are consumed and then are either converted to protein or are excreted into the manure. Improving nutrient utilization and reducing excretion by pigs has been and continues to be a goal of the pork industry. However, if manure nutrients can be utilized for crop production or other use they are not lost but are recycled and reduce costs or add value to the next part of the cycle.

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Concerning the animal portion of the life cycle of a nutrient, significant gains in efficiency through genetic improvement and selection, better understanding of nutrient requirements, diet formulation, feed processing, feed delivery and use of technologies have occurred over the last 30 years. Management of the pig and pig characteristics can impact feed digestibility and nutrient use. Utilizing genetic selection that includes direct environmental criteria could improve nutrient utilization; however, this area has had limited research.

Understanding and applying pig management techniques that impact feed efficiency could also improve nutrient utilization. One example management technique that has not been adopted in the United States, but does improve efficiency is producing intact males. Another management technique that could be adopted is precision feeding for an individual pig on a daily basis. Individual pig feeding is currently not readily adaptable in today’s production systems and likely would increase costs, which impacts one of the other areas of sustainability.

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Another goal of this project is to have a better understanding of the nutrient concentration and digestibility of various feed sources to improve diet formulation. In addition, a better understanding of the relationships of feed and nutrient sources and effects on performance and nutrient utilization could have merit. For example, it is common to use synthetic amino acids and reduce crude protein in swine rations to reduce nitrogen excretion. Further reductions in nitrogen excretion may be possible with additional synthetic amino acid supplementation and reduction in crude protein, but reducing the nitrogen from crude protein has been shown to reduce performance.

Other potential feed technologies to improve nutrient utilization include feed additives. Feed additives such as enzymes, microbials, acidifiers and other additives are being researched and hold promise for increasing efficiency. The use of phytase in swine diets to reduce phosphorus supplementation and excretion as well as reducing diet cost is common today and is an example of enzyme use to improve phosphorus utilization. Additional research on new phytase products and other enzymes and feed additives holds potential to make further gains in nutrient utilization. Additional feed processing methods in addition to grinding and pelleting, may improve feed and nutrient digestibility but need more research. Alternative feed delivery mechanisms that focus on meal size and frequency may also be an avenue to improve nutrient efficiency.

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The outcome from this project is to provide the National Pork Board with values and equations to allow for producers to calculate the recycling of major elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur along with providing the economics of recycling nutrients and the technology that surrounds the recycling. In addition, understanding how effective these various methods are at improving nutrient utilization by the pig and being able to model the effects and potential interactions clearly is needed and is a goal of the researchers within this grant. Additional research will need to be conducted beyond this project to model and find an optimum balance between economics, production and environment for the whole pig production cycle.

This grant is funded by the National Pork Board.