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Technology, innovation have reduced livestock sector’s environmental impact

Updates in technology and management have improved efficiency and reduced animal agriculture’s impact on the environment. 

Jim Mintert is an ag economics professor at Purdue University.

“We use far fewer resources to produce food, in the case meat, using fewer land resources, fewer feed resources, and less manure output,” he says. 

Mintert uses the pork sector as an example…

“Pork production in the US since 1990 has increased 70 percent and yet we’re doing that with a hog breeding herd that’s nine percent smaller than it was in 1990,” he says. “That’s what’s happened as we’ve evolved the technology and managerial changes and the general approach that we’ve taken to hog production.”

He says there have also been large productivity gains in the beef and poultry industries.

Mintert says the advancements in digital ag have greatly benefited animal agriculture.

“There’s a lot of applications of digital agriculture in animal ag that will allow us to improve the way we management animals, improve animal welfare, improve animal health, improve their nutrition, and ultimately lead to improvements in efficiency which is beneficial to the environment,” he says.

He tells Brownfield he’s optimistic about the industry’s ability to use new technology and continue to incorporate it in production agriculture in the future.