Harnessing nutrition to navigate regulatory shifts in animal health & welfare

The agricultural sector faces challenges and opportunities, particularly as climate change continues to impact water availability, farmers’ ability to grow crops, and livestock health. Balancing increased productivity with high animal welfare standards and environmental responsibility requires innovative solutions and ethical practices. Nutrition is a critical factor in this balance.

Alexandra Experton
Sustainability Regional Leader
Cargill Animal Nutrition and Health

As the UK and Europe expand their regulatory frameworks around animal production, farmers and producers face new challenges and opportunities. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, part of the European Green Deal, aims to make food systems fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly.

It includes ambitious targets such as reducing the use of chemical pesticides by 50% and increasing organic farming to 25% of total farmland by 2030. Coupled with the 2022 ban on routine antibiotic use in livestock, these changes are driving a shift toward preventive healthcare and new farm management practices.

In the UK, retailer pressure has led to a reduction in stocking densities for poultry to 30 kg per square meter, below the legal limit of 40 kg per square meter. This change is part of the Better Chicken Commitment, whose scope is across both the EU and UK, focusing on sustainability-related issues such as providing more space, requiring additional resources, and necessitating transport from more locations.

In this dynamic landscape, it’s clear that innovative solutions are needed to enhance animal health and welfare. These solutions must meet evolving regulatory standards, ensuring animals are healthy, comfortable, and able to express natural behaviors.

Animal nutrition plays a vital role in addressing this challenge. Proper nutrition not only supports health but can also help farmers enhance the welfare of animals.

SUPPORTING DISEASE PREVENTION
The World Organization for Animal Health defines animal welfare as the “the physical and mental state of an animal in relation to the conditions in which it lives and dies.” Animal welfare encompasses five key domains: Nutrition, ensuring animals have access to sufficient and balanced food and water; Environment, providing a comfortable living space; Health, maintaining good health and fitness; Behavior, allowing animals to express natural behaviors; and Mental State, promoting positive mental states while minimizing negative ones. Proper nutrition is essential for maintaining animal welfare, as it supports key bodily functions, growth, and immune responses.

Beyond nutritional requirements, feed can play a crucial role in disease prevention. The industry faces significant challenges due to increasing parasite resistance, necessitating a comprehensive approach to breaking the cycle of disease and improving overall welfare.

The poultry industry, for example, faces significant challenges previously controlled by antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs), such as growing resistance among parasites and environmental residues due to anticoccidial drugs. This has led to a need for a holistic approach to poultry production, incorporating a combination of different types of feed additives to break the cycle of disease and improve overall performance.

Phytogenics can play a significant role in this approach. These substances may contain thousands of active constituents, making it difficult for bacteria to develop resistance due to the multiple and potentially synergistic active compounds. Studies have shown that pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Listeria monocytogenes can develop resistance to phytogenics in vitro at a similar rate to conventional antibiotics. However, the quorum sensing (QS) strategy offers a novel approach to combating bacterial infections by interrupting microbial communication instead of eliminating the microorganisms.

REDUCING ANIMAL STRESS
Animal welfare goes beyond maintaining health—it includes reducing stress, another key area of focus in the regulatory landscape.

Regulations such as the EU’s Animal Welfare Strategy emphasize the importance of reducing stress to improve overall animal welfare. Stress can negatively impact animal health, productivity, and welfare, making it a critical area for regulatory compliance.

Cargill offers a variety of tailored solutions to address these challenges. For instance, BehavePro, formulated from active botanical ingredients, helps reduce stress and anxiety in pigs, improving their performance and welfare. It can be incorporated into all diets, supporting sows, piglets, growers, and finishers by reducing aggression and promoting stable growth rates.

BALANCING ANIMAL WELFARE AND SUSTAINABILITY
Enhancing animal health and welfare must be considered alongside sustainability. This makes balancing the animal production equation a little more challenging. Across the EU, companies are under growing pressure to increase use of circular ingredients, reducing competition with human consumption, while maintaining high production.

For example, the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan encourages the use of by-products and waste materials in animal feed to promote sustainability. This regulatory push requires companies to innovate and adapt their practices to meet both sustainability and welfare standards.

In many cases, improving welfare and sustainability go hand-in-hand. For example, optimizing protein efficiency in ruminants can create optimal conditions for animals to digest feed components, improving nutrient availability, reducing both feed costs and reliance on soy protein sources, which supports sustainable dairy production. In the poultry sector, using near-infrared (NIR) technology to non-invasively monitor hens’ body condition provides real-time data for nutritionists and producers to adjust diets based on the flock’s needs, reducing waste, improving performance, and lowering environmental impact.

LOOKING AHEAD
The agricultural sector faces challenges and opportunities, particularly as climate change continues to impact water availability, farmers’ ability to grow crops, and livestock health. Balancing increased productivity with high animal welfare standards and environmental responsibility requires innovative solutions and ethical practices. Nutrition is a critical factor in this balance. By prioritizing balanced and precision diets and adopting cutting-edge nutritional strategies, farmers can enhance the well-being and health of their animals.

About Alexandra Experton
Alexandra Experton is the Sustainability Leader for Cargill Animal Nutrition in EMEA, fostering strong customer relationships in sustainability and driving progress against Cargill’s sustainability goals. Prior to her role in Animal Nutrition, Experton worked across food and agricultural supply chain businesses at Cargill, leading global, cross-business strategic sustainability initiatives. Before moving to the Netherlands, she lived in Singapore for 12 years, where she spearheaded sustainability programs, primarily focusing on palm and coconut. Experton holds an MA (Hons.) in Arabic and International Relations from the University of St Andrews (Scotland). She has also completed courses on Sustainable Finance with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and on Business Strategy and Financial Performance with INSEAD.