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Finding solutions to complex global sustainability and One Health challenges requires interdisciplinary teams to use a holistic approach to address food waste and advance the biosafety and biosecurity of animal feed
The old adage "Don't waste, don't don't" is said to have been first created in 1772, and its predecessor "Intentional waste creates a sad need" can be traced back to 1576. Although we may never know who created these saint phrases centuries ago, one thing is certain-these words still apply today. Just ask Dr. Gerald Shurson and Dr. Pedro Urriola from the science duo at the University of Minnesota.
Two animal science researchers and many other University of Michigan experts have been focusing on the concept of "one health" (the health of people, animals, plants and their shared environment are interrelated) because it involves three different but intertwined The field involves improving the environmental sustainability and biological safety of animal feed, as well as using the precise nutrition and natural functional properties of certain feed ingredients to combat antimicrobial resistance.
What the animals are eating, what the landfill is collecting, and what the virus is infecting may not be obvious to casual observers. But if you go back a few years with Shruson, Urriola, and colleagues Sagar Goyal School of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), Ph.D., Fernando Sampedro School of Veterinary Medicine, and School of Public Health, you will see the outbreak of the swine epidemic from 2013 to 2014 The North American diarrhea virus (PEDv), you can see how the various parts start to come together.
The feed contains a variety of ingredients to ensure the health, well-being and productivity of the animals. Spray-dried pig plasma (mainly pig blood with cells removed) is a feed ingredient that contains highly digestible proteins and amino acids, as well as other health-promoting ingredients.
When PEDv appeared in the United States, causing severe diarrhea and vomiting in pigs and killing millions of young pigs, spray-dried porcine plasma was the first feed ingredient to be attacked as a potential cause of infection. Many pork producers and veterinarians questioned it. safety.
Because porcine plasma provides important health and nutritional benefits to newly weaned pigs during the critical period of development, the team at the University of Michigan wanted to understand how dangerous it really poses. They conducted multiple studies to evaluate the survival rate of porcine coronavirus (including PEDv) in various feed ingredients, heat-treated feed ingredients and surfaces, and the effectiveness of using feed additives to inactivate PEDv in feed. These are key studies that are shared and used with the National Pork Council and the global feed industry.
Fast forward to 2018, and the African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) hit China, the world's major pig producer. That year, 25% of the world’s pigs were lost. These pigs provided meat protein for human consumption and valuable extraction by-products for animal feed. Pigs do not enter the food and feed supply, but enter the landfill, which wastes food and causes environmental hazards.
The ASFV outbreak has caused serious confusion and concerns about the safety of imported feed ingredients (such as soybean meal and vitamins) imported into the United States from ASFV-positive countries. Shurson is a professor and swine nutrition expert in the Department of Animal Science at the School of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) at the University of Michigan. He recalled misunderstandings, panics and accusations in the feed and pork industry and veterinarians of the community regarding the risk of ASFV contamination in imported feed ingredients. .
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, ASFV “is a devastating and fatal disease that, if found here, will have a significant impact on American livestock producers, their communities, and the economy. There is no use for this disease. Treatment or vaccine. The only way to stop this disease is to reduce all affected or exposed pigs."
"Based on the devastating impact of ASFV on global pork supply and previous experience related to PEDv contamination in feeds that led to the PEDv outbreak in the United States, it is not surprising that the import of feed ingredients from ASFV-positive countries such as China needs to be considered as possible imports into the United States," Shulson said.
In 2019, Shusen and his animal science colleague, research associate professor and swine nutrition expert Urriola, and the Vitamin and Soy Department organized a supply chain seminar to bring all the major stakeholders together.
We know that a lot of research is needed, and a lot of learning is needed in all aspects. As scholars, we act as a bridge between the feed industry, the veterinary industry and the pork industry, exploring many outstanding issues.
After the seminar, a grant from the Joint Soy Committee enabled Shurson and Urriola to collaborate with Dr. Declan Schroeder, associate professor of the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine (VPM); Jennifer van de Ligt, Ph.D., associate professor of VPM, director of the Institute of Food Protection and Defense, and The leader of the Integrated Food System Leadership Program; and Dr. Cecilia Balestreri and a postdoctoral researcher, developed a virus-based alternative detection method for ASFV. The team made a major discovery.
This substitute called Emiliania huxleyi virus naturally exists in the marine environment and only affects algae (does not affect animals, plants or humans), so it is a very safe substitute for ASFV, and its structure and resilience are also Very similar. "It is a good choice to conduct various real-world experiments in a safe but reproducible way to understand the behavior of the ASFV virus without the risk of transmission or biosafety issues," Schulson said .
ASFV is still a major issue. By 2021, it is estimated that the second wave of the virus has killed more than 8 million pigs in China, hindering China's pig herd renewal plan. Moreover, ASFV outbreaks have been confirmed in the Dominican Republic and Haiti for the first time in 40 years, closer to North America than ever before.
In an interview with Sarah Muirhead of Feedstuffs 365 in August 2021, Schussen shared a new perspective on assessing the risk of ASFV in the global feed ingredient supply chain. In November 2021, he talked with Muirhead again in an interview entitled "Risk Assessment of the Introduction of ASFV to the United States through Imported Ingredients".
Through global trade, products such as grains, oilseeds, vitamins, and feed additives enter the United States from many different countries. Shurson explained that because we have very little data related to the pollution of imported raw materials, there is a high degree of uncertainty, which makes it difficult to understand and quantify in a meaningful way.
"Many of us who have worked in biosecurity for many years recognize that birds, rodents, domestic pigs, wild boars, and even grains that dry on the sidewalks like in some countries can be risk factors," he said. "But just because something is dangerous does not mean it must be a risk."
Shurson and Urriola often use shark-to-fish ratios to distinguish hazards and risks. Urriola said that an important part of this work is to understand that the survival of the virus in the feed ingredient group represents a certain danger, but this does not represent a quantification of the actual risk.
Sharks in the water are dangerous; if I enter the water with the sharks, I am in danger of being bitten. But if I watch the shark from the shore, there is no risk. So yes, if ASFV enters the feed, it will contaminate the feed, and the feed will become a risk of infecting the animal.
However, Urriola explained that with Sampedro’s food safety expertise; Andres Perez, PhD, VPM Professor, Chairman of the Global Animal Health and Food Safety Foundation, Director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety; like everyone else, they are studying these pathogens How to survive and how to inactivate them, using mathematical models to calculate how much inactivation occurs when processing feed ingredients.
"By combining their food safety and risk analysis experience, the team can more clearly define the possibility of ASFV contamination in animal feed that actually occurs," Urriola said.
A recent paper by Shurson, Urriola, van de Ligt, Sampedro, Perez, and Rachel Schambow entitled "Rethinking the Uncertainty of African Swine Fever Virus Contamination in Feed Ingredients and the Risk of Introduction to the United States" proposed a model available To assess the risk mitigation strategies and critical control points for inactivating ASFV in feed.
Food waste also plays an important role in the multifaceted world of animal feed, and Shurson outlines this in his recent publication, “How wasteful—can we increase food consumption by recycling food waste streams into animal feed? The sustainability of animal production systems? An era of health, climate and economic crises?"
In the early days of MNDrive Global Food Ventures, Shurson and Urriola collaborated in 2014 with Dr. Larry Baker, who is now retired from the Department of Biological Products and Biosystems Engineering (BBE), to participate in the recovery of nutrients from food waste to animal feed for the first time Concepts in and Dr. Jennifer Schmitt, Environmental Research Institute. They collaborated on a project called "No Waste: Closing the Organic Waste Cycle".
This led Shurson and Urriola to collaborate with local entrepreneur David Russick to receive USDA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) funding to conduct nutrition research (September 2018 and April 2019) to determine the feeding of various heat-processed foods The suitability of garbage sources to pigs.
"We have obtained very good results, showing that the feeding value of several food waste sources equals or exceeds traditional ingredients such as corn and soybean meal for pigs, which can transform food waste from a huge environmental burden into a valuable resource in pig feed." Shulson said.
In the United States alone, we discard nearly 80 billion pounds of food each year; food waste is the country’s largest category of municipal solid waste. It occupies a large amount of landfill space and is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in our food system.
In the paper-"Can we effectively manage parasites, prions and pathogens in the global feed industry to achieve a healthy one?"-Shurson, van de Ligt and Urriola briefly reviewed the historical evolution of the feed industry, that is, from grain milling The milling, meat packaging, and milk processing industries redirect, recycle, and “upgrade” valuable nutrients from the by-products produced in animal feed to comply with the law, prohibiting these waste streams from being discarded into water sources and causing environmental pollution.
The concept of recovering nutrients from agricultural industry by-products is a major focus of the collaboration between Shurson and Urriola and BBE professor Dr. Bo Hu, who is the lead researcher of the National Science Foundation project, which focuses on the development of solid-state fermentation of selected fungal species to improve pigs The nutritional value of the high-fiber by-products* (see list of publications). This work has attracted attention at home and abroad, and the team is collaborating with researchers from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) to apply this method to rapeseed meal.
For the pork industry, ASFV is not the only reason why a large number of pigs have not entered the food chain. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the closure of slaughterhouses in the United States caused a severe disruption in the supply chain, and about 3 million pigs did not enter the food chain. In China, there are an estimated 700 million pigs.
Schulson said this will affect global food security and the environment. "When you invest so many resources, including energy (carbon), protein (nitrogen), phosphorus, and water, to produce a pig that fits the market weight instead of for human consumption, it is not only a huge loss of income and farmers’ income. , There are precious nutrients that hungry people could have consumed," he said.
In addition, due to harvest losses, 40% of all food produced was not consumed, including 1.2 billion tons of crops that were lost after they left the farm.
"If we want to feed a growing population, we must first better prevent food waste. Ultimately, the food waste that cannot be prevented must be recycled to the highest possible value. This is to feed it to animals," Schulson said. "There are many conversations about how we can create a more resilient, more efficient, and less wasteful food system." Shurson shared detailed information in another conversation with Feedstuffs 365, titled "How wasteful?!"
Shurson, Urriola, and Hu have been exploring new collaborations and ways to influence our local, regional, national and international food systems. They have been collaborating with Dr. Zhengxia Dou, Professor of Agricultural Systems at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, on research recommendations and educational programs. In order to strengthen efforts to more effectively deal with the huge challenge of food waste in the United States, Schulson and Du recently collaborated to publish a publication for the Agricultural Science and Technology Committee, providing national recommendations for President Biden’s role in agriculture, climate science and Technology 21 project implementation.
Shurson emphasized that meaningful contributions and impacts to improve the sustainability and resilience of our food system depend on interdisciplinary cooperation.
"We must consider these topics from a systematic perspective," he said. "Social scientists, veterinarians, animal producers, food supply chain practitioners, distributors-everyone needs to participate in this conversation. This is complicated, and we can't solve it until we start talking about it and sharing opinions. We All people involved in research and education related to our food system, including the environment, animals, and human health, have a responsibility to actively play a leadership role, promote dialogue among stakeholders, and explore solutions to complex problems. This must be Use'Team Science' to accomplish this."
So while the old adage "don't waste" still applies to these scientific endeavors, perhaps a sentence that appeared a few centuries later is more accurate: "Teamwork makes dreams come true."
* Protein and amino acids of corn-ethanol by-products enhanced by Mucor and Rhizopus oryzae
Fungal fermentation improves the feeding value of corn ethanol by-products and soybean hulls: fiber degradation and digestibility increase
Improve feed value through co-fermentation of corn-ethanol by-products and agricultural industrial residues with Rhizopus oryzae
Nutritional upgrade of fungal fermentation corn ethanol by-products: amino acid enrichment and anti-nutritional factor degradation
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