A multi-million pound project could hold the key to the problem of how to reduce soya in poultry diets, writes Michael Barker
A ground-breaking collaborative project is aiming to turbocharge the production of UK pulse crops and radically decrease the animal feed industry’s reliance upon soya.
The Nitrogen Climate Smart (NCS) project is a farmer-led research programme made up of a consortium of 17 industry and research partners and over 200 farmers. The four-year, £5.9m Defra-funded project has the ambitious target of enabling a 1.5Mt CO2e per year reduction in UK agriculture’s carbon emissions – a figure that equates to 54% of the industry’s maximum potential emissions reduction, as calculated in a 2021 Defra climate report.
The centrepiece of how that will be achieved is a huge increase in the amount of pulse and legume crops grown in this country. They currently represent just 5% of the crops in arable rotations, but the project hopes to demonstrate, through gathering robust trial data, that the figure could be increased to as much as 20%, in so doing providing enough crop to the feed sector to replace half of all imported soya meal used in livestock feed rations. With poultry feed a huge user of soya, there is naturally great interest among broiler and layer producers in the outcomes of the project, given soya represents the biggest hurdle in substantially reducing the sector’s carbon footprint.
The project, now into its second year, is being led by the Processors and Growers Research Organisation (PGRO) and is supported by farm innovation network BOFIN and other industry partners. The starting point for the project, from PGRO’s point of view, was how could environmentally friendly legumes – which do not use nitrogen fertiliser or many other inputs – help reduce the carbon emissions associated with UK agriculture. “With the UK importing 3mt of soya-associated products every year, we saw that beans could be used to reduce the need and reliance on that,” PGRO’s chief executive Roger Vickers tells Poultry Business. “That would not only save all those carbon emissions, but also support UK food sustainability, security and resilience.”
At a time of successive shocks to international logistics, including crises in the Suez and Panama Canals, as well as the impact of Covid and the war in Ukraine, that latter point is not to be underestimated. But right now, sufficient availability of UK pulse crops simply isn’t there: there’s no futures market for pulses like there is for soya, wheat and maize, and therefore farmers and feed producers don’t have the security of supply to confidently switch over.
Convincing enough arable growers that the margin and market justifies increasing legume production is also essential, along with improving production standards across the board. “Some growers will tell you that growing beans is one of the most profitable things they do,” Vickers explains. “The objective is to get the growers who are not doing so well out of it to improve their lot and reliably produce another tonne and a half per acre year in, year out. If you were to do that for no real extra input cost, those growers will start singing a different tune about the level of income they are getting from beans.”
Rigorous scientific data is at the heart of the project, as the ultimate goal is to present the findings to government and policy advisers if a major shift is to take place. “The project is to generate data and show the economics of it stand up,” says Vickers. “The government can influence the carbon footprint of UK agriculture by determining how policy can reward growers for their actions. If it’s an economic and environmental benefit, how are they going to legislate to ensure farmers and land managers pursue that course of action?”
BOFIN founder Tom Allen-Stevens explains that the farmers running the trials on the arable side are known as ‘Pulse Pioneers’, and are paid to be involved. There is a plan to do as many as 100 field trials through the course of the project, with the hope of ultimately getting over 40 Pulse Pioneers involved. Those farmers will also play a key ambassadorial role in helping share the findings of the trials.
Issues for poultry
So much for the issues facing the field production end, but how has the project been received by poultry farmers so far? Brian Kenyon, senior poultry nutritionist at ABN, was a guest on Allen-Stevens’ BOFIN Buzz podcast in July, in which he discussed the challenges and opportunities of incorporating more pulses into broiler and layer diets. A key partner in the NCS project, ABN has been gathering and benchmarking the results of a series of trials on 12 broiler farms over the past year, looking at the impact of including more beans into the birds’ diets. “It’s shown that beans can be fed to broilers without impacting weight performance, but it unfortunately did impact feed conversion,” he revealed. “That’s the amount of kilos of feed you need to get a kilo of chicken meat. It did make that worse, which would seriously impact the financials for the broiler grower, unless the feed were a lot cheaper.”
While that sounds like a major hit to the project’s objectives, Kenyon argued that instead it just proved that if consumers want a reduction of soya, then there is a potential cost to it. He added that there is also more that can be done to reduce the cost, through processing, pre-treatments and varietal selection, which would make any final price increase more palatable to shoppers.
“It is about trying to quantify what the potential costs can be and work on strategies over the four years of the project to reduce that cost,” Kenyon explained. “If it wasn’t going to incur costs we would be [already] doing it today. The problem we have is soya is such a good raw material for pigs and poultry. It has been 20 years since we had to take meat and bonemeal out [of diets], and soya has really established itself as the protein in monogastric diets, so it takes a lot to kick it out.” The next stage of the trials, which will start in September, aims to analyse different bean varieties and examine how they impact performance.
Kenyon is ambitious, and wants to see the proportion of broiler diets sourced from UK raw materials rise from 65% today to 80-85% in the next five years. To do that, he says there needs to be joined-up thinking across the supply chain, as well as a consumer willingness to pay a little bit more. “There’s opportunity for the poultry industry particularly to be more engaged with the whole supply chain of British agriculture,” he said. “The worst thing would be that we do all this work proving the value of beans and the fact we can grow without soya, and then we stop importing soya but start importing fava beans from a third party. It’s about improving British agriculture. Let’s get rid of one of the big sticks about UK agriculture’s carbon footprint.”
There are already a good number of farmers involved in the project, but Vickers says they are still looking for more and there’s opportunity for poultry producers within that. Among the benefits of involvement is the chance to get a free farm carbon baseline calculated through the Farm Carbon Toolkit, which is another of the project’s partners. “I do believe most farms will eventually be compelled to do some carbon accounting and that baseline is the very first starting point,” he says. “You can get that done through the project for free, so why wouldn’t you want to engage?”
There’s a lot to digest and analyse over the remaining three years of the project, but there’s no doubt that those involved believe they could be on the verge of a sea change that could radically improve the farming industry’s carbon footprint.
BOFIN thinks big
The British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN) was founded in September 2020 by Tom Allen-Stevens to represent farmers who carry out their own on-farm trials.
BOFIN is currently leading farmer involvement in four major Defra-funded projects, totalling £11.7m, as part of the Farming Innovation Programme which is delivered by Innovate UK.
The network currently has over 3,000 members, with around 500 farmers at its core. The remainder are scientists, knowledge exchange managers, industry innovators and a growing community of citizen scientists keen to assist farmers with projects.
BOFIN is free to join and there is no obligation for farmers to carry out on-farm trials, or to get involved in projects. For those that do, the aim for BOFIN farmers is to seek a more scientific approach to on-farm trials. The aim is to encourage collaboration, discussion, and to offer a platform to share ideas and for these to be valued.