A new initiative, Good Dog Food, has been launched to develop “healthy, ethical, and sustainable” lab-grown pet food. The initiative is a joint venture between Scottish biotechnology business Roslin Technologies and venture capital firm Agronomics.

This infographic from international NGO WWF illustrates how much soy, in the form of animal feed, goes into producing animal products such as pork, cheese, salmon, yoghurt and eggs. It also explains the impacts of soy production on land use and ecosystem conversion.

This special issue of the journal Animal addresses scientific and technical approaches for reducing the environmental impacts of intensive and semi-extensive livestock production systems, plus challenges and trends over the next few decades.

This paper compares the carbon footprint of broiler meat production in Europe with two uses of insect protein: either as chicken feed (in the place of soybean meal), or as food for direct consumption by humans. There is high variation in performance between insect species. On average, the carbon footprint per kg of protein produced for human consumption is lowest in the case of consuming insect protein directly as food, where the insects are fed on low-value industrial side streams. Replacing soybean meal chicken feed with insects can increase the carbon footprint, especially if the insects are fed on industrially produced composite feed as opposed to a waste stream.

This report from US public policy think tank Brighter Green discusses industrial-style livestock production in Africa, which, although growing, has not yet reached the scale seen in the United States. Starting from the assumption that industrial livestock production is undesirable, the report sets out how Brighter Green engaged with academics and researchers in sub-Saharan Africa to challenge this agricultural development model.

In this paper, George Cusworth, Tara Garnett and Jamie Lorimer of the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) project explore six narratives about the role that legumes can play in the future European food system. They identify three issues that these narratives are responding to as well as three areas of consensus about the potential of legumes.

Carbon credits generated through feed supplementation to reduce methane emissions from cattle farming have been approved under the CORSIA scheme, which is an international agreement on offsetting increases in carbon dioxide emissions from aviation. The feed supplement, created by Swiss company Mootral, is based on compounds from garlic and citrus and has been found to reduce methane emissions by an average of 30% in a trial on a commercial dairy farm. 

This paper examines three scenarios for animal-source food production in the European Union under two constraints: halting all imports of soybeans and soybean meal used as animal feed, and not using any additional land for animal feed cultivation (either inside or outside the EU). 

This paper provides an overview of the environmental impacts of pet food production at the global level. It finds that, depending on the data source used, dry pet food production accounts for 1.1-2.9% of global agricultural emissions, 0.8-1.2% of global agricultural land use, and 0.2-0.4% of agricultural water extraction.