Poultry positioned to exploit sustainability advantages over red meats

Poultry is in a unique position among meat proteins to address the sustainability challenges facing all food producers as demand rises along with a burgeoning world population. Not only is it one of the most efficient converters of grains and oilseeds to meat, poultry has a compelling story to tell consumers about its environmental footprint.

Poultry’s advantage in sustainability is largely genetics-based, and a major poultry breeding company at the National Turkey Federation Convention encouraged producers to tell their sustainability story and capitalize on it.

“At a time when consumers are asking, ‘What is the poultry industry doing about its carbon footprint,’ we also have a responsibility to produce healthy, affordable food,” said Aviagen’s Jihad Douglas at an National Turkey Federation breakfast meeting. Now is the time, he said, for poultry producers to capitalize on their capacity to produce healthy, affordable meat with a comparatively small carbon footprint. It’s a value proposition that can be backed up with numbers and a convincing narrative.

Chicken and turkey’s feed conversions, at 2.1 and 2.5, beat those of beef and pork, at 10 and 5, and poultry’s lead in those measures are expected to grow, explained turkey geneticist Paige Glover at the meeting. What’s more, she said, modern poultry production systems require less land and less water for the production of a pound of meat.

“Poultry has an even greater advantage when it comes to the genetic improvement being made in yield and efficiency traits due to poultry’s generational interval, which is much shorter in poultry than in cattle or sheep or pigs. This allows the industry to continue to further increase our advantage when it comes to the environmental impact,” she added.

Glover told listeners that poultry breeding companies are applying genetic selection technologies that will help the industry extend its lead in producing meat that is both affordable and sustainable. For example, primary breeders are leveraging advances in genomics in combination with traditional genetic selection techniques.

The company projects that the genetic improvements in turkeys, alone, will by 2020 save producers over $120 million a year in feed costs and reduce the industry’s carbon footprint by 1.1 percent or 112 pounds of CO2 per bird per year.

Tell the story.