The Canadian industry is continuously benchmarking production practices and striving to identify best management practices that enhance sustainability. Science-based information is the foundation for identifying these opportunities, with the FAO LEAP guidelines serving as a key resource to define and validate the metrics that contribute to the sustainability of the Canadian beef industry.

In this interview, Tim McAllister, Principal Research Scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), talks about the Canadian livestock sector and the importance of using globally agreed guidelines, such as the FAO LEAP tools, for measuring and improving the environmental performance of livestock systems.

Why does livestock production matter?

Livestock plays an important role in agricultural systems on many fronts. Firstly, they represent a source of high-quality protein and nutrients for humans, offsetting deficiencies and contributing to human health such as cognitive development in humans. They play a critical role in nutrient recycling, converting byproduct and waste stream food streams into high-quality food for humans. In the case of ruminants, they enable food to be produced from vast tracks of land that are unsuitable for arable agriculture due to topography, limited water or distance to market limitations. Many of the grassland ecosystems have not been cultivated due to the occupation of these lands by grazing ruminants, preserving the biodiversity within these ecosystems. In many regions of the world, they still represent an important source of power, reducing GHG emissions, as a result of the use of fossil fuels. The manure they produce offsets the use of chemical fertilizers and plays an essential role in nutrient recycling in both crop and pasture production environments. This area of benefit from livestock is almost certain to grow as food wastage streams diverted from landfills or other disposal methods to feed for livestock. Finally, livestock has a cultural value, with many societies having coevolved with livestock contributing to the heritage, spiritual, and cultural well-being of humanity. 

How has the Canadian livestock sector performed in recent years?

Overall sustainability of Canadian livestock production has become a primary focus of the industry over the past ten years. In the past, sustainability was primarily assessed from an economic perspective, but activities under FAO LEAP have contributed to that perspective being assessed on the basis of all factors that are related to the provision of ecosystem services. The industries have established a number of Global Roundtables and other committees to benchmark the livestock industry's performance and identify measures to enhance this performance. Initially, work focused primarily on the role that livestock play in GHG, with implications for climate change.  Assessments in these areas have demonstrated that all of the Canadian livestock sectors have taken steps to reduce GHG per unit of product produced. This has also resulted in improvements in the efficiency of water use (L/kg product) in livestock production.  Improvements in these parameters have ranged from 10 to 20 percent over the last 30 years. Benchmarks in these areas have been established, and Canadian livestock industries are now identifying strategies to attempt to achieve similar increases in efficiencies over the next 30 years.  After this work, the industries are branching out into other ecosystem service aspects of biodiversity, including implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and sequestration, further enhancing the nutritional value of milk and meat, and the use of benchmarking methods to identify technologies that can lead to future improvements in efficiency.

What are the benefits of improving the environmental performance of the Canadian livestock sector on national and international markets? How can the FAO LEAP guidelines help to achieve this goal?

The Canadian livestock industry is fully aware of the need to continue to improve the environmental sustainability of its sector. Environmental stewardship is becoming part of Canadian livestock products' brand and will play an important role in future market access and acceptance of livestock derived products. Benchmarking and illustrating the continued improvement in environmental performance is an integral component of maintaining and gaining access to new national and international markets. Such work is also imperative to identify and demonstrate the environmental benefits that emerging technologies can confer to improving the environmental efficiency of livestock production. The FAO LEAP guidelines represent a body of documents that have set the approaches and definitions that define the term “environmental sustainability” across the livestock sector. All documents have been developed by international expert panels and received internal review within the FAO and external review globally. This makes the methodology they describe the “gold standard” for assessing the environmental performance of livestock production systems.   

You have been part of the Partnership for years. What are the strengths of FAO LEAP, and on which areas can it focus in the future?

The strength of the Partnership lies in its participants. This includes a multi-sector perspective with representation from governments, academia, industry, and non-governmental environmental organizations. Few developed guidelines have been formulated with such an all-encompassing and diverse group of experts sitting around the table. This has resulted in documents with broad perspectives that recognize both the positive and negative influence that livestock production can have on the environment and the delivery of ecosystem services. This broad-based perspective enables greater precision in identifying improved practices with an appreciation for the multiple interacting factors that can influence the impact of livestock production on humanity. FAO LEAP needs to encourage the adoption and the use of the guidelines within the global livestock sector. Such a practice should enable improvements in the myriad of livestock production systems that differ dramatically based on geographical, cultural, and environmental factors.  Further work should continue to consider the key role that livestock can play in the better use of food wastage streams, the use of byproduct feeds, the preservation of grassland ecosystems from cultivation, and how they can help humanity adapt to accelerating climate change.

What is the role of policymakers in helping to improve the sustainability of livestock production?

Policymakers can play a key role in encouraging the adoption of best management practices within livestock production systems. Some of this encouragement will come from the marketplace where primary producers are rewarded in the market place as a result of the adoption of best management practices. Other approaches could be in the form of rewards for the preservation of ecosystems so as to offset the direct financial gain that could occur by the development of more intensive livestock production systems. Policy regulators also have a major influence over the approval and adoption of innovative technologies that could further improve livestock production efficiency. Decisions with regard to proceeding with these advancements should be science-based and not based on market forces, such as their use as non-tariff trade barriers. Such practices discourage efficiency and can lead to increased environmental damage in livestock production systems.

What aspect of this Partnership makes you most proud?

I have been proud to be part of the process and have contributed to guidance documents targeted at making a difference in global livestock production. The opportunity to interact with international experts in the selected fields has been a truly rewarding process and has contributed significantly to my own intellectual development. The fact that the panels are broad-based with significant varying expertise, in my opinion, has made all members proud to bring their perspective to the table. I think that all participants can be proud in terms of the quality of the documents that were produced and that they are in the process of being adopted to provide guidance to improving the global environmental performance of livestock production.

What are the innovative aspects of the Partnership?

The most innovative component is the nature of the representation requested to serve on the panel.  Few committees are as broad-based as the FAO LEAP committees with industry, academia, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government representation at a global level. The other innovative component is that the Partnership has not tried to “reinvent the wheel” as it has drawn substantially from the foundational work of others that have developed the metrics for defining the environmental performance of livestock. However, where appropriate, it has attempted to simplify some of the approaches used in an effort to encourage adoption by the global livestock sector. Adoption is the key to impact, and real change and “road-testing” is the next logical step in this process.  

How can the FAO LEAP guidelines support the design of science-based policy?

The foundation of FAO LEAP guidelines is anchored in science. They represent the most recent science-based approaches to defining the environmental performance of livestock production. The contributors also represent a rich source of expertise that will undoubtedly continue to develop science approaches that can be used to formulate science-based policy. Implementation of the science-based FAO LEAP guidelines at regional and national levels should provide new insight into policy development that is distinct from that associated with sector marketing objectives. Such an approach is critical as short-term marketing objectives are not always compatible with longer-term environmental impacts. Science-based decisions, in the short term, have the potential to reduce the long-term environmental costs of inappropriate environmental livestock management practices.

About Tim McAllister

Tim McAllister obtained his MSc in Animal Biochemistry at the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. in rumen microbiology and nutrition from the University of Guelph in1991. He obtained a NSERC postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Calgary, where he continued to conduct studies on the relationships between microbial biofilm development and cereal grain digestion in ruminants. After appointments in technical and biologist positions, he was promoted to a Principal Research Scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), where he is presently in charge of a diverse research team handling various projects, including the development of strategies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and improve water use efficiency in ruminants.  

His most recent area of exploration is the role that livestock production systems play in maintaining biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services. He has been the FAO LEAP Technical Advisory Group (TAG) leader on biodiversity and member of different TAGs, such as water or large ruminants.

McAllister has authored over 750 scientific papers and is a recipient of the Pfizer Young Scientist Award, the Canadian Animal Industries Award in Extension and Public, among others. His participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as a lead author on the IPCC 4^th Assessment report of GHG emissions from Agriculture and as a contributing author to the IPCC Mitigation Report on GHG emissions in Agriculture, was recognized by the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize shared between the IPPC and former Vice President Al Gore.