S1032: Improving the Sustainability of Livestock and Poultry Production in the United States
Statement of Issues and Justification
The Need for a Systems Orientation. The U. S. government and state governments in the major livestock- and poultry-producing regions of the U. S. have committed significant resources over the past 10+ years to the development, evaluation and adoption of best management practices (BMPs), advanced technologies and other science-based tools to reduce or prevent environmental pollution from concentrated animal production systems. Many of those tools have been validated at the laboratory, pilot and/or field scales in tightly controlled experiments, but their overall, dynamic impact at the ecological scale is not well understood. Even so, these technologies and practices, as well as policies and incentive structures conceived around them, are being routinely recommended and adopted.Without a comprehensive, general understanding of the systems interactions that govern the overall effectiveness of a technology, a practice, an incentive structure or a policy, the American livestock and poultry industries and state and federal governments will continue to expend huge sums of public and private revenue on implementation of those tools without reasonable expectation of a particular cost/benefit threshold for any of them. It is one thing, for example, to show that a particular tactic is capable of reducing nitrogen requirements in feed without sacrificing mean animal performance (e. g., milk production, lean meat deposition). It is another thing to show that a suite of nitrogen-reduction tactics implemented together on a model farm will reduce net ammonia emissions to the atmosphere. But it is quite another thing entirely to illustrate that the overall impact of a proposed strategy on North American ecosystems (including energy and water resources, wildlife, water and air quality, human health and economic sustainability) will be a net positive and even more elusive is knowledge of what the true cost of that benefit is likely to be on the economic, political and social structures in which AFOs operate and on which they are dynamically interdependent.1
Figure 1 (adapted from Sweeten, 1999) provides a useful context for these systems considerations. This diagram is a model of the environmentally significant stocks, flows and transformations of matter in the North American beef-production system. Of course, any one of the elements in the diagram may be encircled and called an open system by itself, and that is indeed what has been happening over the past several decades as we have developed individual technologies and refined existing processes to increase the efficiency of those individual elements. It is becoming clear, however, that increasing efficiency at the process level does not necessarily reduce ecological stress overall.2 Because real ecological systems are characterized by feedback, human choice and other nonlinearities, changes in one element of the system may propagate through the entire system in an unpredictable or even counterintuitive way.
Figure 1. Schematic diagram of an environmental quality model of beef production in the United States, adapted from Sweeten (1999).SEE ATTACHMENT FOR SCHEMATIC GRAPH DIAGRAM
Another critical characteristic of ecological systems is that they provide very real, very important services that sustain life on the planet. The fact that these services do not have a cash value complicates the accounting and makes their inclusion in economic analyses difficult. But because of the complex nonlinear interactions described above as well as the global nature of todays human economic activity, including agriculture and the energy that supports it, the true value of ecological services must be included in future analyses. Researchers have developed several analytical tools and disciplinary paradigms to account for these services and the impact of human activity, including ecological footprint analysis (EFA), embedded energy (emergy) accounting, exergy, life-cycle analysis (LCA), ecological efficiency and industrial ecology.
FOOTNOTE:(1) To illustrate, what if the technologies are far more energy intensive than the status quo? Does an air-quality benefit in one livestock-intensive airshed simply export air pollution to another airshed in the form of increased demand for electrical power? How might widespread adoption of process-level tactics affect, and be affected by, market distortions resulting dynamically from those tactics or from externalities?
FOOTNOTE:(2) The accelerating depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, which results in large measure from improved irrigation efficiency, is an important illustration of the sometimes perverse effect of technological advance (Marek, 2005; Allen, 2006). In that case, improved irrigation technologies are bringing dryland acreage back into irrigated production, increasing irrigated acreage and net aquifer withdrawals. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the "rebound effect".
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