Some things benefit from shocks - they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors. In his 2012 book “Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder," Nassim Nicholas Taleb, developed the concept of anti–fragility to refer to exactly this.
A couple of years have passed since the COVID-19 pandemic started, and the world now looks very different. Poultry companies have certainly gained a new perspective from the recent shocks.
Higher energy and ingredient prices, biosecurity risks, changing consumer preferences and logistic disruptions, amongst others, have brought acute stress to poultry production. It feels like a unique time, but the occurrence of periodic stressor events is, in fact, a constant.
Working with birds gives poultry producers a direct appreciation of the viability risks to their businesses. Biosecurity, for instance, is a matter of survival. You do not know when challenges may happen, but they will occur.
Designing anti–fragile poultry production systems offers opportunities for innovation, making companies stronger after these shocks.
Recent anti–fragility experience
Highly disruptive viral challenges, such as African swine fever (ASF) in swine production, avian influenza in poultry production and COVID-19 in humans have demonstrated why building antifragility into animal production companies pays off.
Take, for example, the structure of the swine industry in Asia and eastern Europe, which has dramatically changed over recent years in favor of antifragile companies able to overcome the ASF shocks.
The experience of those companies illustrates a couple of antifragile design principles. The first is the need to build redundancy and layers in the system, so that a single point of failure does not cause company–wide disruption.
Ensuring the geographical dispersion of breeding stock, building redundancy into a supplier ecosystem and moving away from excessively centralized processing plants are vivid examples.
Another important principle is building strong collaboration amongst chain participants with “skin in the game." As much as suppliers and retailers have something to lose from production shocks, they can also gain when they add their strength to producers.
In the case of ASF, health, nutrition and equipment suppliers mobilized their resources to investigate, educate participants and develop solutions for producers. Companies with the strongest networks and the best support had an advantage, coming out stronger after the shock.
Building anti–fragility in today's environment
Globalization and specialization have benefitted economic growth and trade, however, the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent macroeconomic shifts, have exposed dangerously fragile areas in the supply chain. The excessive reliance of many countries’ poultry industries on imported feed ingredients, for example, has reduced their ability to cope with shocks.
Fortunately, higher ingredient prices have renewed interest in the better utilization of local ingredients and industrial byproducts, which would appear to be a no–brainer in regaining robustness.
Changes in consumer preferences for animal protein are also an area where shocks are possible in the foreseeable future.
Industry leaders have taken steps to diversify poultry product portfolio and target markets. This includes products differentiated by sustainability, that benefit from consumer preference shifts while making the system more robust.
Precision farming is becoming a reality and more sophisticated solutions are available. The temptation is to treat complexity with more complexity. However, complex problems require simple solutions.
Technology should remove fragility, not add to it. This should become a guiding principle for companies developing solutions for poultry producers.
Successful companies in volatile times will be those that have the basics right, that stick to simple decision–making principles, have robust supply chains, that innovate and that can use technology to build anti–fragility as a competitive advantage.
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