The research behind food security suggests that only a handful of nations are protein insecure. But are the data overlooking the importance of protein quality? Let’s discuss the role digestibility and protein quality play in getting an accurate gauge of global protein security and the positive impact that cattle have on the health of people and the planet.

Holder vaughn
Research Project Manager, Beef Nutrition / Alltech

How do we characterize world food security?

This is an important question to start this conversation. You need to know where you are before you can decide whether or not to act on something. So it is key that we look at this thoroughly.

Paul Moughan, a researcher from Massey University in New Zealand, suggested in 2021 that the way we’re looking at food security in the world today is probably incorrect, which is quite the realization to come to in the 2020s. Basically, they’ve been looking at the amount of protein populations get and using that on what they call a gross protein basis. What that means is essentially the total amount of protein those populations are getting and comparing it to how much we need.

Now, the problem with that is that you need to correct the protein you’re eating to the amount you can actually absorb and the amount your body can actually use at the end of the day. We’ve known this in animal nutrition for a long time, which is what makes it kind of entertaining for an animal nutritionist. When we make that correction to protein supply estimates, we go from a small handful of nations being protein insecure to almost half the world’s countries and territories being protein insecure. This occurs because you are correcting for the poor digestibility and amino acid profile of plant proteins, because plants are quite difficult for us to digest and utilize as a species.

Proteins coming from animal origin are usually complete proteins from an amino acid point of view. They are usually highly digestible and are well utilized because they’re in the form that the body needs them.

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Ruminants are the natural recycling centers of the world

I may be biased as a ruminant nutritionist, but ruminants are essentially the natural recycling centers of the world. They turn all the things we can’t use, all the nutrients in the world that are locked up in these plants – particularly in grasses, leaves, crop residues, byproducts and also food waste – into a form that allows us a second crack at those nutrients. It allows us another way of getting those nutrients back into our food systems and actually being able to utilize them through the ruminants themselves.

There are dramatic implications of protein quantity and quality on human health, particularly on development in children. A speaker at the Alltech ONE Conference in 2022 spoke specifically about the role of protein and protein quality on brain development in infants. Quality protein is critically important both to brain development and in terms of development of the body itself. Stunting is obviously a very, very big issue in nations where protein security isn’t what it should be.

How the livestock industry minimizes waste

Dominant byproducts in the industry will depend on where you are regionally, but if we’re talking about North America, probably the biggest one would be distillers grains. We put a lot of infrastructure and funding into ethanol production in this country to subsidize the fuel industry. That’s probably the most dominant one, but then you go back to the more traditional ones, such as soybean meal and canola meal. These are the things we use as the basis of many animal nutrition rations.

The use of byproducts by ruminants serves a few critical functions in our society. For example, the byproducts that are fed into the dairy industry, those byproducts have another crack at entering our food system, at being nutrients that we can actually utilize.

The second factor is that if there aren't cattle or other ruminants utilizing those byproducts, they typically end up in compost heaps or landfills. As byproducts entering compost heaps, they will end up generating five times the amount of greenhouse gases as they would if they went through a cow, and 49 times as many greenhouse gases if they went into a landfill rather than if they went into a cow. So, the role that cattle play at keeping those byproducts out of the environmental greenhouse gas picture is one that we don't talk about enough.

Fixing food insecurity while staying mindful of climate

I think the world assumes that these two concepts are completely incompatible, but they are not. As we learn how to produce food more efficiently, it involves the elimination of waste. The better we get at this, the less waste is created through the process of raising protein. We've been doing this all along. We must become a little bit more deliberate about the environmental side of things as it becomes a primary part of our considerations around food security.

Ag’s environmental impact can be its value proposition

Agriculture sits in a unique position such that we actually capture carbon to produce food. We’re the only industry that captures carbon for a living. There's no other industry that exists at the scale and at the interface between carbon and the earth as agriculture does. It’s just going to take a universal carbon credit and trading systems to come into place to fund a lot of this.

Europe has active carbon trading systems, and California is actively trading carbon, so it’s happening at varying degrees in different places, but I think it’s not going to really take off the way the world envisions until everybody gets onto the same program of trading carbon internationally.

As a ruminant nutritionist, I look very closely at the cow. For the past two years, I’ve been working with an ecology group in Florida, Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch, and we’ve seen a major mindset change as to what the unit of production is. Instead of looking at the cow as the unit of production, we are looking at an ecosystem as a unit of production because not only do we want to look at what the cow is doing – what's going in and out of the cow – but the most important thing is what’s coming in and out of the ecosystem.

If we’re talking about carbon, how much carbon is captured? How much carbon is going out? We need to know what the ecosystem is doing, so we have to really have a mind shift in how we think about this and think about the ecosystem production of protein with cows as a piece of that ecosystem. When we do that, we find that looking at emissions from cattle in isolation is essentially useless. We need to look at the cows’ emission, yes, but we also need to look at the amount of carbon that is being sequestered by the land, how cows affect that sequestration and even how the cows affect how much greenhouse gas is made by the land itself. Only when we understand the entire carbon cycle can we make informed decisions on how to manage the cycle to reduce the footprint of food production.