Abstract

One Health is an approach to achieve better health and well-being outcomes for people, farmed organisms and their shared environment. The One Health approach was used to analyse the impacts on the environment, people and organisms (including the pigs) of three scenarios for future pig production to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses when compared with a Reference case reflecting today's pig production. The scenarios were: Business as usual scenario (AsUsual), Sustainable Feed scenario (SusFeed), and Sustainable Feed and Pigs bred for feed efficiency and better animal welfare scenario (SusFeedPig). In SusFeed, the pig diets were without soybean meal but with locally produced feed ingredients including yeast protein. The pigs had access to an outdoor veranda, silage and straw for enrichment, and were selected using today's breeding goal. In SusFeedPig, pigs had the same feed as in SusFeed, had access to pasture during summer and were selected using an alternative to today's breeding goal with focus on overall feed efficiency and improved animal welfare. In AsUsual, pigs were fed current diets including soybean meal, had no access to a veranda and silage, and pigs were bred based on today's breeding goals. The different scenarios were assessed using a One Health framework with 13 success metrics. The selection and scoring of indicators for success metrics may be subjective because they depend on individual assessments that can be variable. SusFeed performed better than the Reference case on nine success metrics, SusFeedPig on eight and AsUsual on six. Sustainability in all the future scenarios was improved when compared to the Reference case but SusFeed with the alternative breeding goal was the most preferable scenario due to reduced negative effects for the environment, people and farmed organisms.

Keywords

One Health approach; Future pig production; Pig breeding; Yeast protein; Environment; Silage

Published in

Livestock Science
2022, volume: 260, article number: 104929

Authors' information