Breeding for sustainable livestock, how genetic selection can provide significant and permanent reductions to livestock emissions with Matthew Cleveland

Over human history animal protein has always been a luxury food. Meat is the first thing people generally chose to buy when they rise from lower to middle income.  With the current cost of living crises across the world, further food price inflation predicted due to climate change, geopolitical instability, and biodiversity loss, increasing impacts on productivity due to climate change, as well as the growing impact of dietary related disease, the big question is how much longer will we be able to afford this luxury. The answer is it’s complex. Today we are joined by Paul Behrens from Oxford University where he is working on systems to reduce the environmental harm and increase the resilience of our food systems. The three things we can change are what we eat, the amount of food wasted, and how we produce our food. Paul sees all three as being necessary for the future health of ourselves and the environment.You can listen to our conversation here.Send us a text

Beef supply chains have been described as the most dysfunctional and least organised supply chains of everything available in the supermarket. Today we are joined by Lamar Steiger and Neil Mellers from Ranch2Retail who are building connected beef supply chains to improve economic performance of the whole chain and environmental outcomes. Data across all participants is a key component of creating and sharing the extra value. It took over 100 conversations before Lamar found a rancher who was interested in rising to the challenge of creating a premium supply chain for Walmart that provided consistent product, reliably at consistent price which give the customer a great beef eating experience across 4600 stores.  Prime Pursuits now supplies about 600 Walmart stores across the SE USA. You can listen to our conversation here.Send us a text

In this episode I am exploring the rapidly growing rates of obesity globally, the rapid rise in the use of GLP-1s or obesity drugs,  how these are impacting our food systems, and how obesity and poverty seem to be linked. In the US around 10% of all Americans are either using GLP-1s or have tried GLP-1s, with early data showing a 5-10% decrease in food spending and a significant change in the foods people are purchasing. Yet, it's only the wealthiest that can afford these drugs. Today we are joined by Jack Bobo, Director of the Rothman Family institute for food studies at UCLA where he is diving deep into how GLP-1s are reshaping the food system, consumer behavior, and human health.Obesity rates are skyrocketing globally. In the US 42% of the population is obese and three quarters are overweigh. Australia is hot on the heels of America and much of the world is moving in the same direction.  The cost of the is also growing.  In the US obesity and metabilic disease are costing about $1 trillion a year and that figure globally it between $10-12 trillion.  Yet it’s complicated, soda consumption and sugar consumption in the US are at 30 year lows, all while obesity is at an all time high. Sugar taxes have let to high income people losing weight and lower income no losing weight. Which follows a general trend that with almost every intervention, healthy people get healthier and unhealthy people don’t.Jack is also the author of "Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices"Send us a text

Today we are joined Aimable Uwizeye, Livestock Policy Officer for the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations where he is part of the team that implements the Sustainable Livestock Transformation initiative within the Animal Production and Health Division. Increasingly the impartance of animal health is being identified as a key aspect of improving sustainbility and reducing emissions.Aimable's mission is to promote global change towards a sustainable livestock sector by tackling climate change, reducing methane emissions, enhancing biodiversity, and reducing nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Join me in this journey to create a more sustainable and resilient future for our planet.  Send us a text

The Australian livestock industries now produce high quality product, that is full tracebale, quality assured, with real time market information coming from a sophisticate supply chain that sells into high quality markets with preferential access including 16 FTAs. This has transitioned from an absolute commodity industry with only one free trade agreement, no traceability, national ID system, limited market information and a disconnected supply chain just 30 odd years ago. Today we are joined Jason Strong, a long time advocate and leader in the Australian livestock industries including as the former Managing director of Meat and livestock Australia and former CEO of the AACo, Australia’s largest integrated cattle and beef producer, and is the oldest continuously operating company in Australia.Jason sees the greatest opportunity is making progress in areas that are efficiency productivity driven but has other knock on benefits, including the reduction of enteric emissions with the methane emissions from the base cow herd being the greatest challenge and poor reproductive performance being crucial to improving emissions intensity from these cows. Trust is the most critical thing to capitalism on these opportunities.  Send us a text

Humans have been selectively breeding animals since before Roman times. Modern technologies and tools including genomics and artifical intelligence has hugely increased the rate of progress. Increasingly, sustainability traits such as the enviromneatl footprint of production are being included in breeding programs in addition to productivity, efficiency, and profitability traits.   Today we are joined Matthew Clevlend, a geneticist who leads sustainability at ABS Global across their beef and dairy genetic improvement programs. Early indications are that the heritability of methane emissions are between 20-30% which is similar to many traditional production traits. In addition, these improvements are both cumulative and permanent, and applicable to production systems across the Global North and Global South.   Send us a text

Political scientist Sparsha Saha from Harvard University joins us to challenge the status quo in meat politics. How can a sector so vital be so overlooked? Sparsha shares groundbreaking insights, exposing the unusual political dynamics surrounding animal welfare and the unexpected urban-rural divide on climate policies related to meat consumption. We grapple with the low prioritization of food and water in political discourse and the urgent need for heightened awareness in tackling ecological crises.Our conversation takes a deep dive into the path toward building inclusive strategies in the plant-based and regenerative agriculture sectors. By bridging gaps across ethical and expertise boundaries, we uncover how collaboration can drive meaningful social progress. Sparsha and I discuss the public's yearning for genuine moral leadership on critical issues like food and water, and consider how emerging leaders, particularly younger ones, could resonate with people's fundamental needs. Furthermore, we examine how cultural expressions, especially music, can capture our deep-rooted connection to the land.We turn the spotlight on the pressing challenges and potential solutions within the global food systems. Recent crises, from food shortages to geopolitical tensions like the Ukraine war, have emphasized the vulnerability of these systems. Sustainable practices such as regenerative agriculture and mindful water usage in farming are more essential than ever. We also introduce the "eat less but better" concept, advocating for reduced animal product consumption to enhance biodiversity and sustainability. Sparsha and I underscore the socio-economic struggles faced by vulnerable communities dependent on unsustainable food systems, urging systemic policy changes to foster security and equity.Send us a text

The least productive 10-20% of producers are causing 60-80% of the environmental impacts but only produce 5% of the food. Incentivizing these farmers and ranchers to change can significantly improve the sustainability of our food systems with minimum impact on global food production. Today I am joined by Jason Clay from WWF who focuses on working with the  private sector to improve supply chain management especially addressing habitat, biodiversity, soil health, irrigation, effluent, and green house gases. Jason leads the Markets Institute to improve sustainability in internationally traded food and soft commodities, known as Codex Planetarius.We need to move away from looking at averages. With the largest 10 commodites we are finding there are three to five production systems globally and the difference between the most damaging  decile and most sustainable decile is 10x. Between any two of the 5 production systems it can be 50 or 100x. Huge reduction in the environmental footprint of these systems can be achieved by addressing the bottom. The culture of eating animal protein is engrained in millions of years of evolution. With over 400 million Chinese people raised from poverty this century and a further 1 billion Indians being taken out of poverty the increased demand for animal proteins is not going to disappear. Send us a text

The 350 million hectares of global irrigation consume 3-4 Mississippi’s worth of fresh water every day. This volume of fresh water used for Irrigation is continuing to increase, especially across the global south, exacerbating the challenge of how we produce more food with less water. Today we are joined by Bruce Lankford, who has been working on Water and Irrigation Policy across the developed and developing worlds for over 30 years. In a recent blog post Bruce wrote about how Irrigation is colonising water and is being colonised; on research and teaching gaps in irrigation. He concluded that because many consultants, analysts, researchers, research projects, funders and decision-makers are not fully interrogating irrigation as a complex system, irrigation is colonising freshwater, and it is being technically, conceptually and financially colonised.Send us a text

Economics, markets, and policy all have significant impacts on human behavior and decision making. Nick Parker is an environmental economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Hoover Institution who has been studying the human interaction with wolves, and especially the indirect effects wolves have on environments they live, to examine if it was possible for wolves to actually benefit humans and reduce threats to human lives and property. He found that the reintroduction of wolves into Wisconsin and other US States led to a 25% decrease in deer vehicle collisions. The research suggests that two thirds of this reduction is due to how wolves change deer behaviour rather than just eating deer.  The wolves prefer to travel along strait corridors such as roads, creeks, and railway lines leading to fewer deer in the vicinity of roads. The benefits from wolves was found to be 63 to one when the costs associated with human mortality, injuries, and damage to vehicles was compared to the compensation payments the state was making to ranchers for livestock predation.However, the impact of wolves and deer populations on communities is actually far more complex than just vehicle collisions and predation of livestock.  Deer also eat farmers crops, damage gardens, and damage timber, and they can spread Lyme disease. So deer vehicle collisions are only one aspect of the damages caused by over abundance of deer. Wolves also help control subservient predators like coyotes and foxes and and compete with mountain lions and bear. In the US the number one cause of livestock damage is from coyotes. Large deer populations can also provide economic benefits through hunting. All these indirect effects also feeds into the cost benefit analysis question. Economics is a powerful tool for optimizing natural resource use and it is possible to set up a system where those who benefit compensate those who bear the cost.“Is it possible to set up a system that those who benefit compensate those who bear the cost. Because, as an economist, I think that's the that's the gold standard for determining the optimal level of any natural resource use that's both the asset and a liability. Like wildlife is the asset and a liability. Some people want more, some people want less. Those who want more should pay for it, and those who bear the cost should be compensated in some way.” The big challenge is that policy frequently focuses on the direct effects with little consideration of the indirect effects. Nick Parkers’s study on impact of wolves on deer vehicle collisions shows that for policies to be effective the whole system needs to be understood as the secondary, and tertiary effects and how these can be more important than the primary effect. “If you want long term resource conservation and sustainability, we need policies that cause users of those resources to treat them like they're the owner. Now we might not want to convey ownership, and might not be practical or politically feasible, or even socially desirable, for individuals and groups to own every natural resource. But if we have have policies that encourage them to act as if they own it, then the incentives are going to be lined for long term.” You can listen to my conversation with Nick parker here.Nick Parker is the Ilene and Morton Harris Senior Fellow (adjunct) and the Hoover Institution and the Anderson-Bascom Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Send us a text