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How attend the pork demand an affordable cost without compromising the environmental integrity?

The diet manipulation is the most common and can be efficient for reducing the environmental impact of production systems. The nutrient efficiency could be improved by better adjusting nutrient supply to individual requirements of the animals. This can be obtained with the different protein source combination and/or amino acid inclusion, as well with the increasing in the feeding phases and the precision feeding (Pomar et al., 2014).
For a complete evaluation of environmental impacts, it is necessary to evaluate all impacts involved in the production chain. Accordingly, the life cycle assessment (LCA) may provide a solution. Through LCA it is possible to analyze the contribution of pig farming in different production scenarios, considering the environmental impacts in an integrated way (Garcia-Launay et al., 2014).

Combine a modelling approach and LCA in the pig production

In this PhD thesis project, we perform an LCA of the pig production in different scenarios, one in the Brazilian production context and the other in the French context, evaluating four different feeding programs: two phases, four phases, multiphase and precision feeding. These strategies are combined with three formulation scenarios built with least-cost formulated feeds:

• without amino acid addition,
• with amino acid addition and minimal crude protein constraints,
• with amino acid without any crude protein constraint.

For each scenario, two feed ingredient context were considered differing in protein sources: soybean meal only or soybean meal and meat and bone meal (Brazil) and soybean meal, rapeseed meal and pea (France), and two types of soybean origin (Centre West and South Brazil). For diet formulation, we utilized the method described by Pomar et al. (2014), which consist in two complete diets formulated to satisfy the requirements of pigs at the beginning (diet A) and at the end (diet B) of their growing period. The diets A and B are blended according to the feeding program; the proportions of each feed are calculated to meet the animals’ requirements at the beginning of each feeding phase, as illustrated in Figure 1.

 
For these evaluations, we used performance data from experimental studies in Brazil and France to create the animal profile through InraPorc^® Software, and calculate the nutrient requirement for growing-finishing pigs. With population version of InraPorc (Brossard et al., 2014), we create virtual populations of 1000 pigs according to the method developed by Vautier et al. (2013) and perform the simulations with each of feeding strategies in order to calculate the individual performance and excretion data in each country. The LCA approach will be used for the calculation of impact of each ingredient and of production systems, in each feeding strategy.

The thesis of Alessandra N. T. R. Monteiro is a sandwich thesis partially conducted in Brazil (State University of Maringá, Paraná) with a stay of one year in the Sysporc team of Pegase unit of research, supervised by Jean-Yves Dourmad, with the contribution of Florence Garcia-Launay, Ludovic Brossard and Aurélie Wilfart (UMR SAS).

Contact

Jean-Yves Dourmad : Jean-Yves.Dourmad[at]rennes.inra.fr (supervisor)
Alessandra Nardina Trícia Rigo Monteiro : Alessandra.Monteiro[at]rennes.inra.fr (PhD. student)

References

• Brossard L., Vautier B., van Milgen J., Salaun Y., Quiniou N., 2014. Comparison of in vivo and in silico growth performance and variability in pigs when applying a feeding strategy designed by simulation to control the variability of slaughter weight. Animal Production Science 54, 1939–1945. (DOI)
• Garcia-Launay, F., van der Werf, H.M.G., Nguyen, T.T.H., Le Tutour, L., Dourmad, J.Y., 2014. Evaluation of the environmental implications of the incorporation of feed-use amino acids in pig production using Life Cycle Assessment. Livestock Science 161, 158-175. (DOI)
• Pomar, C., Pomar, J., Dubeau, F., Joannopoulos, E., Dussault, J.P., 2014. The impact of daily multiphase feeding on animal performance, body composition, nitrogen and phosphorus excretions, and feed costs in growing-finishing pigs. Animal 8, 704-713. (DOI)
• Vautier, B., Quiniou, N., van Milgen, J., Brossard, L., 2013. Accounting for variability among individual pigs in deterministic growth models. Animal 7, 1265-1273. (DOI)