What's the problem with animal feed

This could be a glimpse of the future. Amy Chappell is a young Devon pig farmer with her eyes on the future of farming and restoring the planet's health. Her slow-growing pigs are reared on a soy-free diet and she's offering consumers a planet-friendly alternative through meat that's fed on locally sourced feed. But why does she need to? One of the biggest ways our food is linked to the destruction of rainforests is actually through animal feed. We went to see Gerry Olford from the Innovative Farmers Research Network to find out more. The biggest issue we have with global soil production is the way that we're taking out rainforest in order to grow more. It became the easiest crop that we can grow. It's sort of considered by the trade to be a bit of a super protein food because it contains all the amino acids and so they've developed the whole farming system around soy as opposed to looking at the alternatives. Such is the demand for meat that vast areas of fragile ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon and the Cerrado are being cleared to grow soy, which is predominantly used for animal feed. The UK imports over three million tons of soy every year from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. It's mostly used to feed factory-farmed chickens. But soy also forms a large part of the diets of pigs and dairy cows. We've got alternatives. We've always grown peas and beans in this country. We've got lupins. We're standing in a field of grass here. We've got grass. You know, even free-range birds get an awful lot of benefit from the protein that's contained in grasses and clovers. So we've got alternatives. We've just become embedded to this sort of this route. Gerry told us about a trial he ran with farmers. One of the problems we have with the peas and beans within diets is that they contain anti-nutritional factors, and we know from human consumption we have to soak a bean or a pulse before we eat it. Does it mean they can't digest it? So they can't digest it properly, and so it's inefficient. But we found that by heating up the beans, and actually we did it in the trial, we actually did it in a lager, up to 180 degrees for three minutes, just breaks down those anti-nutritional factors, which means the protein becomes much better available and more useful. That's a change from the processing we've ever done before, but it means that we could include more peas and beans in the ration. And we've heard a bit about how insects might be able to kind of come into this, being a nutritious protein-rich feed source. What do you know about that? Well the insects, it's interesting, at the moment we're not allowed to feed insect meal because of the regulations, the legislation. We currently feed live insects. The food is the larvae rather than the fly itself, so what we can do is feed vegetable waste, turn that into insect protein. We're actually increasing the potential quality of the food, so again we could maybe reduce the amount of soya, because we can add in those higher quality ingredients, so we need to make the diet right for the pigs and poultry. So we're not really looking for the next soy? I don't think we ought to be. I think every animal species requires a diverse diet. There is no one-size-fits-all alternative to soy. In fact, it's actually about a mix that works for the breed of animal and the farming system that it's reared on. Farmer Mark Chappell's been testing different methods. We were looking at introducing broiler chickens about four years ago and met up with the guys from Ethical Butcher and they were specifically looking for somebody to produce a chicken soya free. We're being told it couldn't be done and I figured that a pasture-reared chicken, if it could be done in any setting, then that would be where it would work because they get such a more varied diet from the model of pasture-rearing. The principle is they're moved daily onto fresh pasture, so they're getting new clean grazing every day. They're following the cattle, scratching around in the dungpats and gaining some of their diet from that, because it's natural for a chicken to feed on that sort of thing. They're omnivores, they eat insects and worms. The main grower ration that we use, we've played around with it. We're using beans, peas and rapeseed meal. They have it in front of them all the time, so it is a fairly major portion of their diet, but it is amazing how much they will actually graze and get from the pasture as well. Encouraged by the results, Mark's daughter Amy decided to test it out on her pigs. It's not an easy thing to switch a feed, but the chapels are adamant they wanted a locally sourced feed that didn't require imports. Well I sort of thought, well if you're doing it with chickens, why can't I do it with pigs? But the main kind of reasoning was that I wanted to have a local, sustainably produced diet for them, rather than importing things. So I do a market and people walk by and they say, oh you've got soy-free meat, I didn't know that was a thing. And then so they're like, wow I'm really impressed that you're doing that. The alternatives are often cheap and with the exception of insects, readily available. Things like peas, beans, wheat, by-products from brewing, they could all be used to replace soy in animal feed. So what's the hold-up? Why can't all farmers simply stop using soy? There's a little bit of a problem within the supply chain here because there is a massive supply chain working with soy. The local farmer is then being told, well we don't want you to grow peas and beans because I can replace it with soy dead easy, I don't want to buy your product. And the farmer is saying, well I want an alternative crop that isn't monoculture wheat, I want to grow peas or beans. And so we have a bit of a sort of a clash, if you like, between the farmer who wants to do the right thing. And we know that peas and beans in a farming rotation bring diversity, they bring massive soil health benefits. They provide pollinator and beneficial foods when they flower. They're a superb crop in a rotation, but there's just not a big enough demand out of the supply chain at the moment for the farmer to be paid enough for what he's producing. So I guess part of the problem is we've got an intensive feed crop for an intensive farming system. We have a monoculture crop system which just feeds straight into an intensive industrialised farming system which feeds straight into that sort of ultra-processed food sector. And the whole thing has become so interlinked and we need to try and break that. And I think the more we ask for it, you know, the supply chain will move if we are all asking for it. So what we've heard is that soy is an intensively produced feed that keeps the wheels turning on an intensive factory farming system. These slow-grown breeds, reared by Amy and Mark, they live outside and they're allowed to reach their weight naturally without the need for a protein-intense feed. But it wouldn't be possible to rear an indoor chicken on a soy-free diet. Cost is an issue, as is the scale of the farm. Because not every chicken farmer can afford to install an insect-producing unit on their land. So what we need more than anything is to move away from intensive food systems. In the meantime, there is a groundswell of sustainable farmers trying to cut out soy from their animal feed. In doing so, there's a huge potential to increase the diversity of plants growing on farms and it could also create a circular economy of waste and by-products. More importantly, this could eventually break the link between deforestation in Brazil and the food on our plates.