Casey Bradley
0:00:00
Hello, this is your host, Dr. Casey Bradley, and you're listening to the Real P3 podcast, a podcast dedicated to the pork professionals around the world, and it's brought to you by the Sunspine Group and Spine Nutrition Management. Welcome to our special sustainability series. I'm Dr. Casey Bradley, joined by my co-host Mitch Roland. Today we're thrilled to feature Lara Moody, Executive Director of the Institute for Feed Education and Research, or better known as IFEEDER. For nearly 15 years, IFEEDER has been a cornerstone in promoting sustainable feed and pet food supply chains through research and education. Lara has an extensive background in stewardship and sustainability from academia to industry and leads IFEEDERs mission. Her work involves cultivating strategic partnerships and advancing research and education initiatives crucial for informed decision-making in US agriculture. In this episode, alongside Lara, we'll explore IFEEDERs innovative sustainability initiatives. These efforts not only enhance industry practices, but also contribute significantly to global food security and environmental conservation. Join us for an engaging discussion on the future of sustainable agriculture in the transformative work of IFEEDER under Lara Moody's guidance. Let's dive into this important conversation.
Mitch Rowland
Welcome everyone to the Real P3 podcast. On our last episode, KC introduced me as a host. So we're going to continue that trend and I'll be the host of this podcast where we're going to be talking with Lara Moody from IFEEDER. Lara, would you introduce yourself for us and the audience?
Lara Moody
0:01:50
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on today. I'm glad we ran into each other some time ago at a conference. So as you noted, Lara Moody, I'm the Executive Director of IFEEDER, which is the Institute for Feed Education and Research, and that's the Research and Education Foundation. We're a 501c3 that works in support of the American Feed Industry Association and the U.S. feed industry. Can you kind of give us a little bit of a background of IFEEDER? Sure. So, IFEEDER was started by the industry in 2009, and IFEEDER was originally created to help support the industry through some projects that, you know, the industry knew they needed to have, but that AFIA didn't have within its portfolio or within its wherewithal to do. And so the foundation was created to take on some special projects that the industry felt was important. And so over the last decade, the foundation has evolved with time. When I came on board in 2021, so I've now been with IFEEDER for two and a half years, we completed our first strategic plan. So IFEEDER's mission is to advance understanding and trust in the sustainable animal feed and pet food supply chain, and that could mean many things. But with that, we knew it was important to narrow IFEEDER's focus a little bit. So we can't be something that supports everything everybody wants in the feed industry. We could, you know, there's lots of different tracks we could cover. But we felt that the biggest gap that the industry had, a hole that the industry had, was its ability to engage from a sustainability standpoint. And in particular, you know, not only the sustainability efforts that we needed to do internally within our own feed organizations, but also how we're able to support our customers and their customers, what they need from the feed industry. And so that sustainability aspect became a place that IFEEDER could focus some of its efforts. So we evolved in the last decade, and now we have a pretty clear focus that we're pushing and driving towards so that we can support our industry members and their customers and those customers.
Mitch Rowland
0:04:01
So you guys have a toolkit. Could you explain a little bit about what's in that toolkit, how the industry can use it, what its purpose is?
Lara Moody
0:04:10
Sure. So when I first came on board and we knew we were starting to go down that path of sustainability to support the industry, we were just kicking off a project. We call it our Sustainability Roadmap Project. And the Sustainability Roadmap Project was to take a look at where we were in the industry from a sustainability standpoint, what we needed to be doing, what our downstream stakeholders needed from us, how we needed to be supporting them, what type of information they were looking for from the feed industry. As part of that roadmap effort, we did a lot of our feed industry members didn't know where to start, they wanted a template, they wanted some tools they could utilize to help them take this path. And so that was the kind of the reason behind the toolkit. The toolkit itself has several elements within it. of resources and then we indexed them to what we call the crawl, walk, run approach. So we know that when you look at really any industry, but the feed industry is no different, that you have industry members that are on a broad kind of landscape of journeys in sustainability, right? You're publicly traded, multinational companies have been engaged in this space for quite a while now, they're likely to have a team that's focused on sustainability. Then you have, you know, another tier down of companies that are still quite large companies, maybe privately held. They may have a person who's assigned to focus on sustainability. And then you go another tier down and we have a lot of regional entities or even some of our, you know, larger privately held ones that haven't started to tackle sustainability yet. And so in that space, we have this broad landscape of folks as to where they are on their sustainability journeys, and we wanted the toolkit to have a little bit of something for everything, everybody. So, for example, within the toolkit, if you're the person that has been tasked with taking on sustainability, and that's true, like I've had folks from some companies be like, I'm the product manager, and our CEO just asked me to take on sustainability. I'm not certain where to start, right? If that's you, then we have, for example, a glossary of terms, like how do you even begin to speak the language? What does scope one, scope two, and scope three mean? What does GRI mean? What are material issues? Like what do those terms mean? We also have in there something that is like a best practices sheet. So we collected information at the sustainability summit we did last year from many individuals who are practitioners in the space, and we collected a set of best practices that folks could consider. So that's a tool that's in there. One of the challenges with sustainability is how do you get return on investment from those efforts, right? So we created a document to help work through that, right? So what's the value, how do you create value in sustainability for your organization? And the worksheet helps you like work through, you know, what could you currently be doing? What are you doing? What are your suppliers doing? What are your competitors doing? What do your stakeholders want? And like those, asking those types of questions helps you like get a feel for where you want to be in the sustainability space. But beyond that, there's other resources in there that talk about trends. What are members of the industry doing? What are their focuses? What are stakeholders doing? What are their focuses? Right. To provide background information. And then there's also, I think, a resource for maybe folks that are further in their journeys, which talks a lot about how we communicate on sustainability and what kind of key terms we should be integrating into our conversations and our communications. So the toolkit really has a little something for everything, everybody, and we're continuing to add to it.
Mitch Rowland
0:08:15
Thanks for giving us that insights into that toolkit. I have a follow-up question to that. So a lot of pressure that producers get come from customers, which come from the final consumer for antibiotic-free or non-GMO products. Does the toolkit have anything in there for a producer to show their customers, you know, maybe these demands are not as sustainable as some of your customers may think they are?
Lara Moody
0:08:42
Yeah, the toolkit is really geared towards the feed industry itself, but we have some other resources that are available. So IFEEDER has done a variety of different projects and work. One of the things that IFEEDER has done before taking on the sustainability roadmap work was projects, was a project looking at something like the use of non-GMO feed, right? So several years ago, there was a growing interest by some of the food and beverage companies to offer, for example, non-GMO yogurt, or non-GMO eggs, or non-GMO beef, right? And so as a feed industry, you know, we recognize that for those entities to be able to offer something like that, they need to have animals that are consuming GM-free food. And so the industry said, well, what would that look like for us? Can we even do that? And is that a valuable thing to do? And so we undertook a study with Iowa State University. And one of the challenges that we have with converting back, I would say, to non-GMO free crops is that so much of our corn and soybean crop is already GMO crop, right? And so we're talking about 90 to 95% of seed that's used is already GM seed. And so from that then, one, it would be hard to backtrack, but two, there's a lower cost, higher yield opportunity for the producer to be using GM crops. We also then have to think about all of the co-products and byproducts that we feed. So if we're, you know, when you start looking at ethanol production, right, or biofuels production, which is where we currently have a lot of our corn meal or our corn and soy going, you know, that means that there's a lot of byproducts or co-products coming from that. So, that means that your corn meal or your corn oil or your DDGs that are coming off those products are also grown with GMO crops. And so, there's a big shift that would have to take place. But from an environmental standpoint, the very reason that folks want to grow it, because it's higher yielding and lower cost, the seed itself isn't lower cost, but all the inputs, including fuel use, are lower cost. Those are the same things that make it an environmentally beneficial crop to grow when we're growing GM seed. Because just when you look at fuel usage alone, so just looking at fuel usage, like we have to use so much more fuel to go back and forth over a field when we're growing non-GM for more passes across the field, that drives up the greenhouse gas emissions, right? That drives up the CO2 emissions tied to the non-GM crop. And so, one of the points that we analyzed in the study led us to the calculation that basically a 5% increase in non-GM corn, right? So if we increase the number of acres by 5% to non-GM corn, we could increase greenhouse gas emissions by 7% annually. So that means, like, that's not a good thing to do, right? From an environmental or from a sustainability standpoint, that's not the right path. Similarly, land use is a big question, right? Because we don't want to be taking things out of native habitat. And so if we were to increase, if we were to like to use more non-GM crop, that would mean we'd have lower yields from that crop, we'd have to increase our acres of crop by 6 to 8, to 6 to 16 million acres, right, to be able to cover that difference, which means that we'd have to pull more acres, right, out of grassy habitat. So again, neither of those are great things. And so that would be, you know, that's not information in the toolkit. That's information that's a different project we have, but you can find all that on IFEEDER.org and there's a full report that really addresses that.
Casey Bradley
0:13:03
I was going to say, that's the biggest challenge I have. We work with a lot of niche producers and obviously they're smaller, so they want to you know, go for the higher margin type of products. And one of the ways is non-GMO. And it's like that tough balance. I know that this is not the sustainable approach. You know, growing up in ag and working through in the advances we made on the crop side and the livestock side, it's a challenge to balance that. But it is something that we try to do for our producers as well. But it does create even challenges of sourcing, as you said, in, you know, quality ingredients for them, for their livestock.
Lara Moody
0:13:45
Well, sourcing is exactly an important element. One of the components of the study also looked at the potential, like, the cost increase that's tied to using non-GM source products, and it has to do with segregation, right, because we have to be able to clearly segregate GM from non-GM. And when you start looking at the segregation requirements that you have to have in not only the elevator, but also in the feed mill and the different production lines, then you can really start to drive up the cost that's associated with that. So I think, yes, there is a clear opportunity that is easy for producers to see on the niche side from selling, you know, non-GM meat, but I would just say, it's not that it's not out there, because you can certainly do it, and there are folks in the feed industry that see that niche as well, but make sure that your supply chain allows you to have access to the non-GM feed that you're looking for, as well as all the other byproducts and co-products that you use, thinking about DDGs or meal.
Casey Bradley
0:14:46
We can just use the corn example, the cost difference, so the last time I looked on USDA, our USDA dashboard that we have is mid-fours, maybe upper-fours per bushel for corn. Well, our consumers are paying $7 to $8 a bushel right now for non-GMO corn. That's not even organic corn. And so, it really does put that price in there, and how do we play into that, but the other challenge we have in our region from a feed manufacturing standpoint, and I come from working with companies like Comback and Big Mills and being able to make whatever I want, to we don't have anybody in our region that can pellet non-GMO feed. So, when we talk about sustainability, we want to pellet it feed even, but because that gets more feed efficiency and things like that, but we still struggle with balancing sustainability costs while trying to hit that niche market that they're trying to market their meat to.
Lara Moody
0:15:47
Yeah, I mean, just going back to that. So the study looked at all the different types of segregation that we could do within the feed mill to be able to have a product line, create a product that's non-GM. And the cost of that was anywhere from like four, an additional four to $9 per ton of feed, right? That's really significant when you're thinking about how that implies, you know, what the implications are for making that profit off that niche market.
Mitch Rowland
0:16:19
So I want to address something, we may should have addressed it at the beginning of the episode, but what is the true meaning or what is IFEEDER's working meaning of sustainability? Because you can go out on Google and look up sustainability and get a ton of different definitions of what that actually means. So how is IFEEDER using the word sustainability in your company?
Lara Moody
0:16:44
That's a great question because in some cases, you know, people refer to the many definitions of sustainability and if we can define it so many different ways, what is it even and why should we be doing it when there's no clear definition of it? And that's not a reason not to act. So I feed her, and I would say there's a reason there are so many different definitions. The reason there are so many different definitions is that sustainability by nature is how you address issues that are material to your organization or your sector. And so every definition should be different because you want your definition to be built around the things that are priorities for you and your customers and your organization. And so for IFEEDER, we've taken that approach as well. What we've said is it's not for IFEEDER or AFIA for that matter, to define sustainability for the industry. But our suggestion is this, right? So we see in the U.S. animal food industry that sustainability is defined and managed by each individual organization to deliver measurable and continuous improvements on the impacts related to people, planet, and governance that are most important to them and their stakeholders. So in a nutshell, we're saying, okay, your organization should decide for yourself which things related to people, planet, and governance, that could also be ESG, right, Environmental, Social, and Government, it's kind of the three pillars of sustainability. For those areas, which ones do you think would benefit you and your stakeholders to deliver measurable, which means you're measuring it, and continuous improvements towards. And so, again, the reason there's so many different definitions is it's not for me to say, OK, our focus is going to be greenhouse gas emissions. No, I mean, if you're in the pork production side, it's animal health and worker safety, right? You'd be really hard pressed to put some of the environmental elements as top priorities in your sustainability kind of bucket for your organization if you can't do the things that you need to do well to be a be an organization, right? Many times you hear people say it's hard to be green when you're in the red. Right. And so if you don't have if you don't have a solid foundation of, you know, safe feed or safe pork production, you don't have the workers and the workers say, can you do it? You don't have the human capital that you've managed. Then how the heck are you going to do all those other things that are important? Right. And so I think, again, that's why there's so many different definitions, because your organization's definition for sustainability needs to be catered to the issues you have in hand, what your customers and stakeholders need from you. The key is measuring and continuous improvement. That's the key to sustainability, right, is that you're putting a marker in the ground. You've identified the things that are important. You've listed what those are. You're setting some goals about those and you're figuring out how you're going to make continuous improvement to get there. So that's why there's so many definitions, I think. And I think it's good that there's a lot of definitions because we need to create them for ourselves. Yeah, and I would say how we focus on sustainability here, you know, makes me seem small compared to like the Cargills of the world. But, you know, I'm a real big supporter of NIAMRI, so we're part of that and trying to get more involved on NIAMRI on antimicrobial resistance. I want drugs and medications to be available for my children's and my grandchildren's generations. And so that's where we put our flag in the sand, or as you called it, to focus on doing research, creating products, working with our customers on ways that we can mitigate antibiotic use and that is at least from today how we support sustainability for the entire livestock industry. Right, so there you have it, another definition of sustainability. For us, exactly. But it's your definition, right? So I think that's that's the really important thing is not to not to use the number of definitions out there as an excuse not to move forward in this space.
Mitch Rowland
0:21:18
So, I'm going to continue off the antibiotic slash antibiotic-free topic for just a second. Not too long ago, we were, you know, putting antibiotics in nearly every feed as kind of a growth promoter at subclinical doses and then quickly switched to antibiotic-free. And now we see a company or two might be going back to the some use of antibiotics. So are we seeing another shift in the market from some of your customers or clients? Is that a shift that we're seeing coming or is this kind of a one-off thing that we might be seeing?
Lara Moody
0:21:56
Well, I have to fess up here. I'm not an animal nutritionist by training, right? I'm an agricultural engineer who loves working with agriculture, loves working in stewardship, and has a real passion for advancing agriculture so that we can continue to be resilient and sustainable into the future. So, I also am not the right person to talk about trends in the animal nutrition industry. So, I can't really speak to that space is we are seeing an increased amount of I'm going to call it ration innovation that's occurring right for a variety of reasons so we're seeing ration innovation whether it be in the essential oil space or in the direct end microbial space or in enzymes those things are happening to counter kind of the antimicrobial element or, you know, ingredients as drugs, right, or ingredients for animal health, right? So that ration innovation is taking place. To me, in the sustainability realm, the important piece that goes with that is a lot of the things that we, the industry, are bringing as innovation to solve some of those challenges also happen to have some other benefits. Those benefits are in the gut, like better gut health, better feed conversion efficiency, improved immunity, all of those things. Like if we can reduce the number of sick or animal, if we can reduce the number of mortalities in a barn, then that means that that grow out or that flock is or that herd is going to have a better sustainability footprint per animal than if those mortalities had occurred, right, because we're getting more animals per production turn. Similarly, if we can improve the feed conversion efficiency, that's a certain, you know, number of tons less feed we have to feed for each turn, right? If we can improve the production efficiency through improved gut health, improved animal performance, we can get the animals out of a house two days faster. If we get the animals out of a house two days faster, we reduce the energy footprint for that house. We reduce the greenhouse gas footprint. We reduce the water use for that house. We reduce the light use for that house. Similarly, we reduce the tons of feed. All of those things help reduce the footprint of the animal. And so I would say in the ration innovation space what we have to look at is the things that we're doing for animal health, we also need to think about how those impact the sustainability footprint or what they do to help reduce the environmental footprint of the animal. And so IFEEDER in fact has a project going on right now. So we're in the process of evaluating, I would say, a handful of different product categories in the ration innovation space and working on developing a methodology that our industry members can use to do those quantifications. So if you're a feed ingredient company, you're standardly calculating feed conversion efficiency. Great. Now let's use those numbers as an indirect measure of environmental benefit. And so we're coming up with a methodology to do that. And we're going to start, you know, putting some numbers out there to show what the landscape of that could look like. Because we think Ration Innovation is a place that we have a solution in the feed space for sustainability for our customers and not so much part of the challenge. So that's my thought in that space.
Casey Bradley
0:25:38
Well, definitely. We just did a project for Farm Health Guardian on looking at disease prevention or biosecurity and what that does for sustainability. And it's quite phenomenal if you can prevent a disease, for instance, even getting into the facilities, the changes we have in greenhouse gases. Just one little barn, 27 cars of CO2 gases, for instance, on the loss of feed efficiency. And then we go into mortality, and that gets to be a little more complicated of when those animals die and how much feed they consume and stuff. But there is huge sustainability stories around it. I think we just, you know, we want to talk about feed efficiency and selling feeds or ration innovation is difficult because what's my ROI? I need a three to one. And where I've challenged some of the companies I've worked with is we do need to go to the sustainability officers to position some of these ration innovations, as you call them, into the market because it really, that one or two points may not be a cost benefit or maybe cost neutral for them to implement that technology. But when it comes to the Tysons of the world sharing their sustainability story, for instance, that could be huge on just those greenhouse gas emissions and understanding that.
Lara Moody
0:27:07
Well, the truth is, is that we're terrible at telling our environmental story. We're terrible at it. We're really good at talking about production efficiency. We're really good at talking about how much we save the consumer in their pocketbook because of our production practices. We're really terrible about telling our environmental story. You know, Mitch, the conference that we were at, I heard the professor from University of Auburn, like he spoke before me, and he said, you know, basically in 2017, it was taking us 35 days to grow out a flock of broilers, and that was, you know, say 30,000 birds. And now, he said, this year, 2023, we've got that number moved to 32 days to grow out a flock because of all the different innovations, genetics. Look, there's a lot tied to that, right? You tell me, three days' worth of feed for 30,000 birds? That is a footprint reduction, right? We just never calculated it. And so to me, that's the stuff, that's really exciting to me. And it's why we have the greatest agricultural production system in the world is here within the US. But we do a terrible job quantifying those things. In some cases, you know, we just don't think we should have to, or we don't want to have to talk about it. Like there's a variety of reasons why we're so bad at it. But yeah, like it is where we have to get better. And to be able to communicate those stories is really important. And I would say especially because of the up and coming consumer, right? So, like, what drives us in this space? There's a lot of things that are driving the sustainability space from the Conference of Parties or COP 21, the original commitments that everybody made about greenhouse gas emissions, or the drivers that are publicly traded companies and their need to be able to have good rankings and a variety of indexes because of investors and investments, that's driving it as well. But the consumer is also driving it, especially that younger consumer. There was a study that came out last year, or I guess this year, earlier this year, and it wasn't just a survey of consumer sentiment, it was a survey of what consumers were purchasing. So they were looking at the SKUs on 44,000 different products. And so the SKUs is that little barcode. So not just like what the consumer was thinking, but actually what the consumer was buying. And so they kind of sorted those 44,000 products by things that had some type of sustainability label on them versus those that did not. Now, you could argue that what they named is, you know, is there a sustainability label? Like that's, there may be some, you know, little inconsistencies there. But in general, anything that had some type of sustainability it had 25 percent greater growth as a product category than the things that did not. That's why this is happening, right? And so I think we also then, knowing that, seeing that happening, especially with the younger generations coming along, they are responding to this type of information, right? We as an industry, both feed and livestock and poultry animal production, we need to do a better job at telling the environmental side of our story as well. I think we have the data to begin to do that. We have to get better at consistently doing it and communicating it. I'm going to be carbon neutral by, I'm not sure the exact date, but ultimately they're buying our carbon credits. And then, you know, we have on the other side, people bashing us and not understanding the facts and the fact that we have reduced carbon emissions decade after decade in every part of agriculture in the modern world. What are your thoughts of carbon credits and that kind of story and how do we save face in the feed industry to make sure that we're capturing all that and we get credit for really being sustainable manufacturers? Well, let's say, number one, you could have a whole podcast series on that topic. It could be the next step of your sustainability discussion. And there are others that are way more experts on it than I am. The carbon credit space is, I would say, still complex and still confusing, especially when it comes to agriculture. Because of considerations that we have to take into place for credit stacking and avoiding double counting. And if we sell a credit and it goes to Delta, do we even get to count it as our credit anymore? And so baselines matter. And so there's a lot of challenges within that space. I am not going to wade into the many things that occur in the carbon credit space. I think you should, I really think you could do a whole, you could do a whole podcast on that. I could help you find some expertise for that. Except to say that there is an opportunity for the ag space because we have the ability to reduce our footprints. When you listen to some of the individuals talk, I'm going to step away from swine and say on the ruminant side, right? When we think about our potential to be able to modify the animal's diet to reduce the enteric methane emission from them, or when we think about the opportunities that we have to, on the crop side, right, do carbon sequestration, right, by implementing cover crops, implementing minimum tillage, like all of those things are potential pathways to us to be, you know, not only like reducing carbon, but the potential to be carbon neutral or carbon negative. Right. And so there are some, FreightMintLiner at UC Davis would talk about the trends that we can be on to be not only carbon neutral, but climate negative with our ruminants. And so we clearly have opportunities in that space. The credit trading and stacking space, they're still trying to ensure the details are correct so that agriculture doesn't lose out, right? Because we don't want, the last thing we want to do is like sell a bunch of credits that we then don't get to utilize for ourselves if we're ever regulated. And so I think that's the complexity in the space. We certainly have the potential to generate credits. We have the potential to further reduce our footprints. The question is, what's the right thing to do with those credits? Do we keep them for ourselves? Do they need to stay in agriculture? Do they need to stay within the food and beverage space? How do we make sure that our baseline, that we're making improvements upon our baseline and that we're not losing out the ability to count those. So it's a complex space. It's still evolving, I think. But there are certainly opportunities for feed and animal agriculture in that space.
Mitch Rowland
0:34:37
I think this has been a very interesting and enlightening discussion, not only from a sustainability aspect, but getting a further view into what you're doing over there at IFEEDER. As we wrap up our episodes, we do like to give our guests an opportunity to give any final thoughts that you may have that we may have not talked about or ask questions to either Casey or myself.
Lara Moody
0:34:58
Yeah, I would just say that as a reminder of what I said at the beginning, so IFEEDER, the Institute for Feed Education and Research, we are a 501c3. While we try to get some grant dollars to cover the cost of our work, the majority of our dollars do come from contributions. And so we have corporate and individual donors. And if some of the work that we're doing speaks to you out there in the audience, you know, we'd love to talk to you or love to have you engaged. We try to have our donors engaged in our projects and provide input because I think it's really important to have folks participating. I myself don't want to give money to something that I don't have a bit of an active role in. And so we try to do that with IFEEDER. If you want to learn more about IFEEDER or any of the projects or the toolkit, you can go to IFEEDER.org to find that information. We have a newsletter that is monthly that contains information about IFEEDER, and there's always a way to contact me through that. So I just appreciate the opportunity to be on today. If anybody wants to learn more about IFEEDER, you know, find us on IFEEDER.org.
Casey Bradley
0:36:07
Well, thank you for sharing that because I was going to ask you to do that anyways if Mitch did not. But I think it's really important. I really love to see how IFEEDER has grown and transformed from the initial stages of that. And thank you for all the work that you do to help support our industry.
1
0:36:26
Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on. Thanks.
Casey Bradley
0:36:28
Thank you for tuning into our discussion on sustainability in the animal food industry with our esteemed guest, Lara Moody from IFEEDERs. To learn more about their groundbreaking initiatives or to support their mission, we encourage you to visit IFEEDERs website, www.IFEEDER.org or i-f-e-e-d-e-r dot o-r-g. Your interest and your support play a vital role in shaping a sustainable future for our global food supply chain. Until next time, I'm Casey with Mitch Roland, and if you get a chance, hug a pig for us today. today. Hug a pig for us today.
