The antibiotic age

Last month, I attended the Alltech ONE ideas conference. Alltech is a global company that produces lots of different products that may be used in many segments of agriculture. Every year, they host a group of bloggers to their conference and ask us to write about what we learned. This was my fourth year to attend, and I would love for you to see what I’ve learned at previous Alltech conferences.

This year, several of the sessions I attended covered the topic of antibiotics. Alltech is a forward-thinking company that is working to reduce the use of antibiotics in food production. They offer feed supplements that farmers can use to keep their animals healthy and productive rather than using antibiotics.

There were also several discussions about sustainable energy and the use of fossil fuels. During one of those discussions, the speaker, Ramez Naam, shared a quote from a former oil minister of Saudi Arabia.

He said, “The stone age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”

That discussion was about oil and energy, but I think that the premise can be applied to antibiotics.

Agriculture has changed a great deal in the past 6 decades. Our population is growing at a staggering rate, and farmers have had to adapt to meet the demands for food in our world. Getting to this point in agriculture has taken lots of tools and one of those tools has been and still is antibiotics.

I have written about antibiotics before. People have trouble understanding the use of antibiotics in food production; the fact that some bacteria adapt to become resistant to them, and that farmers use antibiotics to help keep their animals healthy and are careful to treat their animals in such a way that antibiotic residues don’t end up in our meat. Farmers and consumers have concerns about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, and, in food production, antibiotics are at the front of everyone’s mind.

We have to remember that the Stone Age didn’t end overnight. People slowly figured out new and more efficient ways of doing things. They found new materials and new ways to use old materials. Then, their ideas spread around the world.

We can’t expect the use of antibiotics to end overnight either, but things are happening quickly. Farmers are using a whole-systems approach to improve animal health. Meanwhile, animal scientists are figuring out new ways to help farmers produce healthier animals without the use of antibiotics or with a vastly reduced use of antibiotics.

At the conference, Dr. Aiden Connolly, talked about several ways that animals may be managed to help reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics.

Genetics: Everyone has that friend who never gets sick. The same happens in the animal world. Some animals are just better at fighting disease on their own. Now, we have the ability to find those specific genes in animals and select for them. By breeding the healthiest females to the healthiest males, and eliminating the more sickly ones, fewer animals will get sick and fewer will need antibiotics.

Biosecurity – health management: In a previous post about antibiotics, I jokingly mentioned that you can’t teach pigs to wash their hooves, but we can manage the humans and the equipment going in and out of farms to keep disease from spreading.

In April, I went to two pig farms in one day, and I took four showers that day. On modern swine and sometimes poultry farms, humans are required to shower in and shower out. That means you take a shower, and only wear clothes that belong to the farm. Even underwear (TMI, sorry). Other precautions included washing the vehicles that we drove every time we entered a new farm, keeping wildlife away, and limiting visitors.

Sanitation and reduced contamination will reduce the exposure of animals to bacteria that cause disease, and will reduce the need to treat those animals with antibiotics.

Nutrition: Keeping animals well-fed and healthy will help their bodies naturally fight disease. Scientists are also learning how to create an environment in the animal that promotes health and fights bacteria without antibiotics.

Gut health and the Microbiome: Last year I wrote a post about the human microbiome, but animals each have their own microbiome. Dr. Stephen Collett, from the University of Georgia, spoke at the conference and he said that when we choose animals for breeding, we are not only selecting their genetics, but also their microbiome. Mothers pass their healthy bacteria to their babies, and all animals share it in their barns, pens, and fields.

The interactive effect of a healthy gut and nutrition is so important. Farmers are learning to feed the good bacteria to fight the bad ones. Dr. Collett said, “We can’t win the war on disease by killing, we have to win by multiplying. We have to nurture what we want.” Using nutrition to feed the healthy bacteria will lessen the need for antibiotics to fight the bad bacteria.

The day after the conference, I watched a webinar by some animal scientists from Texas A&M. They spoke about bacteriophages, viruses that kill specific bacteria. They exist everywhere in nature. Some animals naturally carry them in their guts to help them fight bacteria that might make them sick. Obviously, bacteriophages are part of the microbiome. Scientists are learning more about them and how they can help fight bacteria every day. 

Keep moving forward.

Farmers and scientists are adapting every day to how we fight disease and pathogens in food animals. With every new break through, we have another tool in our toolbox to fight dangerous bacteria. One of the exciting things about working in the food industry is that it is constantly changing.

There is no way our industry is ready to completely stop using antibiotics, but we are finding ways to use fewer antibiotics all the time. The whole industry will continue to keep moving forward to a new age of total animal health. 

The founder and CEO of Alltech, Dr. Pearse Lyons, has a great quote that I think can be applied to the transition away from antibiotics, “Don’t get it right. Get it going.” Changing the tools we use to produce food for 9 billion people is not going to be easy, but we have to keep moving forward. Get it going.

You will never be lonely again ~ a Meathead’s take on the Microbiome

I was invited again this year to attend the Alltech Symposia to learn about new and emerging technologies in agriculture and food production. Alltech is a global food and Ag company that produces feed ingredients and supplements for all parts of agriculture including cattle, swine, fisheries, equine and crops. They view agriculture as a whole food system, and are very interested in tackling global health issues with solutions applied to food and crops.

One of the most interesting sessions I attended covered the Microbiome, led by Dr. Rowan Power, an Alltech scientist.

He said that we used to say, “You are what you eat.”

But now, he says, “You really are what 100 trillion and one of you eat.”

Each person plays host to about 100 trillion bacteria (that doesn’t even count fungi and viruses). These bacteria live on and in your body, including on your skin, in your nose, mouth and eyes, in your lungs, and, of course, in your digestive tract. Over 1,000 species of bacteria live in your intestine, mostly your lower intestine. Yummy.

A few more facts about your microbiome:

• Bacterial cells out number human cells 10 to 1
• The microbiome comprises 1 to 3% of your body mass (that’s 2 to 6 lbs on a 200 lbs person)
• The total microbiome may consist of 10,000 species
• The bacteria in our gut allow us to digest foods
• The number and variation of the bacteria will vary from person to person

Microbes and weight loss

Doesn’t everyone have that one friend who can just think about going on a diet and lose 5 pounds? Scientists like Dr. Power are finding that the way our bodies react to changes in what we eat is largely dependent on the bacteria in our gut. What we eat is not as important as what the bacteria in our gut do with the food we eat.

In one study, scientists removed the gut bacteria from some lean mice and introduced it to mice that were completely germ free.  They did the same with bacteria from obese mice. The mice that were given bacteria from the lean mice became lean, and those given the obese mice bacteria became obese. So, the bacteria in your gut may have an impact on how lean or obese you become.

Dr. Power also said that when scientists looked at the bacteria in lean people, there was more variation in the bacteria in their guts than in obese people. People with more variation in their diets had more variable bacteria to digest their food and were leaner. (Makes me second guess my oh-so-consistent breakfast routine.)

Microbes and feelings

You know how some foods make you feel so good? Most neurotransmitters (the chemicals that send signals within and from our brain) are derived from nutritional factors. So, the way our microbiome breaks down food can actually affect how good we feel. Get me some happy bacteria!

How do we change our microbiome?

The microbiome will change based on what you feed it. If you eat a diet of fat and sugars, your microbiome will adjust to digest fat and sugar. If you eat more leafy greens and vegetables, the bacteria will change to digest those. So, the more variety in your diet, the more variety in your microbiome.

Medicines like antibiotics can also change your microbiome. Everyone has been a little sick to their stomach after taking antibiotics (or you’ve had a sick child that has developed a nasty diaper rash after being on antibiotics). Even the bacteria on your skin can be affected by antibiotics. This is why doctors suggest that you eat yogurt after you’ve had to take antibiotics. Yogurt is full of healthy bacteria and you need to re-populate your gut with healthy bacteria after you’ve had antibiotics.

Scientists are figuring out new ways to alter the microbiome in humans and animals all the time. There are foods and supplements that can encourage the growth of good bacteria and discourage the growth of bad bacteria. Of course, we all know the benefits of eating yogurt and drinking acidophilus milk. Cattle farmers have been using feed additives called ionophores to optimize the microbiome in their stomachs and help cattle digest feed more efficiently for years.

Dr. Power said that pretty soon, human health efforts will encompass care for the human as well as care for the microorganisms that live on and within the human. We may be able to treat chronic diseases in humans by treating and altering the bacteria that live within them.

Personally, I am excited about this emerging science in microbiology. I think it will be neat to see the medicine and treatments for diseases like Krohns and diabetes that might emerge from our new understanding of the microbiome.

AgriCultural Fusion

It takes a village… a global village

For the past several years one of the hottest trends in food has been cultural fusion, two or more cultures contributing to one dish or a restaurant concept. For example, last year after the Alltech Symposium we went to a little place called The Local Taco where I enjoyed the fusion of Asian and Latin American dishes with my Korean BBQ Tacos. I also had a Buffalo Chicken Taco. Another fusion of cultures. Oh my goodness! They were amazing!

As I was thinking about this year’s conference, my mouth watering in anticipation of some more Korean BBQ tacos, I realized that those culturally-infused tacos were a kind of symbol of where agriculture is going in the future. We have to embrace AgriCultural Fusion or we will get left in the dust.

This was my third trip to the Alltech Symposium. Last year, I wrote about the things that global agricultural companies do for the average consumer. It’s always an enjoyable time, a great time to interact with my blogging buddies, enjoy some fermented beverages, and learn about the next big thing in agriculture.

This symposium is by-far the most international meeting I attend regularly. This year, 88 countries were represented among the attendees. The conference is translated into 6 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. Alltech is involved in agriculture all over the world. The founder’s son, Dr. Mark Lyons, is currently in China working for the company.

I love meeting and visiting with people involved in agriculture from all over the world. This year I made a new friend from the Netherlands. In year’s past I’ve met folks from Mexico, Venezuela, and several from Ireland. Every one of them has a place in global food production.

Everyone involved in agriculture is thinking about and preparing to feed the 9 billion people that will populate the Earth in the year 2050. In the livestock industry, we are especially concerned with the 3 billion people will enter the middle class in that time and be demanding more animal-based foods like meat, milk, and eggs.

It will take a global effort to get us there; a global village to raise all the food we need and get it delivered to people in a safe and sustainable way. In agriculture, we will have to learn to embrace doing things in new ways to produce enough food to feed everyone.

General Colin Powell was a speaker at the conference and I think he had a great quote about China. He said, “The Chinese have a different system, and they like it. They used it to pull 400 million people out of poverty.”

I don’t mean that we will have to all do things exactly the same way, but we need to have some AgriCultural Fusion to improve everyone’s productivity. We will learn things from South Americans and Africans and Asians and Europeans and Australians and apply what works in the US. They will do the same in their country.

You wouldn’t sell many Korean BBQ tacos if that combination didn’t taste good. (mmm… tacos)

Feeding the world is going to take thinking globally and acting locally. AgriCultural fusion shows itself in lots of ways already.

• It is as small as me trying to figure out how to grow Chinese cabbage in my back yard.
• Cattle breeders in the US use Japanese cattle breeds such as Wagyu or Akaushi to improve marbling in our beef.
•  It may be applying techniques of Korean natural farming to farms in Hawaii.
• Students at Abilene Christian University research techniques for raising goats and share them with African farmers.
• Americans teach pork and dairy farming techniques to farmers in China.
• Charities, like Heifer International, give livestock to families in the developing world and teach them how to care for them.

AgriCultural fusion is happening all around us. Thanks to technology, our chance to learn from other cultures is only limited by the speed of our smart phone.

It will be so exciting to see where we go from here.

What does Alltech do for the average consumer?

Last week I was invited to attend the Alltech Symposium. Alltech is a global agricultural company that produces a variety of products used in several segments of food production. Other than their beer (which was quite tasty), bourbon, and coffee products, a big portion of what is produced by Alltech is sold to others within agriculture. The average consumer probably doesn’t even know the company exists.

So, that got me thinking. When people ask me where I was last week; why I left my kids and my husband for 5 days to attend a symposium hosted by a global agriculture company, what will I tell them? How do I relate what Alltech does to them and their everyday lives?

What does Alltech do to affect the average consumer?

·         DHA ~ Docosahexanoeic acid. The most important of the omega 3 fatty acids, DHA promotes brain and eye health in babies and small children and is important for heart health and immunity in adults. New research is showing that kids supplemented with DHA have greater attention spans and sleep longer (Score!).

Most DHA comes from fish oil or a diet high in fish. The fish get the DHA through the food chain, originally from algae. Alltech is capturing the DHA directly from the algae and working on ways to get it into livestock feed. In addition to making the animals healthier, the DHA will be deposited into meat, milk and eggs. Then, our everyday foods will be naturally supplemented with DHA. No more fish oil pills or worrying about over-fishing the oceans for DHA.

The Alltech Algae plant

We toured the Alltech Algae plant in Kentucky while we were there.

·         Antibiotics ~ A hot topic in animal agriculture today. Consumers worry about the overuse of antibiotics in livestock. Alltech works with farmers to improve the health and immunity of their livestock and help them reduce the amount of antibiotics used on their farms.

·         Farming technology ~ We’ve all heard about how massive amounts of data is used by marketing companies to follow our purchases at stores, and we’ve seen stories about the military’s use of drones and small, remote controlled aircraft. At the symposium, we discussed how those technologies can be used by farmers to produce food more efficiently. Imagine computers helping farmers know when to plant and harvest crops or when a cow is getting sick. I was personally quite impressed with the possibility of using a drone with a camera attached to it to check cows in hard-to-reach places on our hilly farm.

The camera-mounted drone

When farmers work more efficiently, more food is produced. That will not only affect the price of food, but the availability of food throughout the world.

·         Promote new science ~ Alltech embraces science and the role science plays in food production. Research discussed at the symposium explored the way nutrition can change the genetic code of babies in the first 1000 days of life. This Nutrigenomics research is in its infancy, but it takes support from companies like Alltech to drive these hypotheses from ideas to real-world applications that will make us and our children healthier.

·         Bees ~ One in three bites of food that Americans eat is directly or indirectly affected by bees, but the bees in our country are suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder. The bees leave the hive, never to return. Education and awareness are the biggest factors in helping the bees, but Alltech is conducting research to figure out how to save the bees and get them healthy again.

·         Food safety ~ Obviously food safety is important to consumers. Food safety is dependent on all the links in the food chain.  In a global food supply, those links may span across several countries that have varied levels of food safety regulations. Alltech recognizes that challenge and utilizes an all-encompassing Quality system that ensures food safety and traceability of their products regardless of the regulations (of lack of regulation) in the country that supplied it. This approach will reap benefits for their products, but more importantly, it will set an example of consistent, high quality food production worldwide.

·         Environmental sustainability ~ Sometimes sustainability can be hard to define. At last year’s symposium, Alltech brought together scientists from all over the world to discuss ways to measure and improve the environmental impact of animal agriculture. I wrote a post about our carbon hoofprint after the meeting last year.

·         Look at the Global Picture ~ We live in a big world and the number of mouths to feed in it is increasing more and more each day. Because of its size and scope, Alltech is able to focus on improving pork production in China, grain production in Europe, and beef production in Brazil. Some of that focus is on products that can be sold within agriculture today, some is in developing products for tomorrow, but some is simply bringing together people in the world that can work to solve the challenges that we are facing today and the opportunities in the future.

 

Sometimes I think we forget the benefits of having lots of interests can be. A global agriculture company like Alltech can have a huge positive impact on consumers every day, and the consumers may never know about it. As with all the folks involved in agriculture, the people at Alltech are working hard to provide a safe, healthy and abundant food supply for the entire world.

 

I learned so much at the symposium this year (and last). I'm really excited about my next post about what I learned about Africa!

What about our Carbon Hoofprint?



A cow in Hawaii
Notice the Pacific in the background

Animal Agriculture and the Environment

As a meat producer and a mom, I hear a lot of information about animal agriculture and the environment. Some groups claim that meat production is one of the main driving forces hurting the environment. They claim that we need to go ‘back to the start’ in food production, insinuating that we should go back to producing food the way we did decades ago.

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about the enormity of the meat industry, and the massive numbers of animals and people it takes to keep 313 million Americans fed meat each and every day. We can’t go back to the food systems of 1950 and expect to be able to feed everyone that we have to feed today. Not only would food be much more expensive, taking our food production systems backwards would be bad for the environment.


Do you want to go back to the 1950's way of communicating?

This week I had a wonderful opportunity to attend an agriculture symposium hosted by Alltech, a Kentucky-based company that makes a wide variety of products used in different aspects of food production. They are a very innovative company and it’s exciting to learn about all the new possibilities in agriculture. (but, more about Alltech in a future post).


One meeting I attended at the symposium focused on the Carbon footprint of animal agriculture. There are several animal scientists and agriculturalists who have focused their research on limiting the impact that food animals have on the environment.

It’s true that producing food from animals results in the production of green house gasses. All animals breathe out carbon dioxide and cows produce methane in their stomach when they digest their food. It’s just how their systems work. Regardless of the way a farmer produces food (grass fed, organic, antibiotic free, or conventional), some green house gasses are going to be produced.

I was excited to learn one of the speakers at the symposium was my friend, Dr. Jude Capper, author of the Bovidiva blog. But, unfortunately, the storms early in the week delayed her plane and she wasn’t able to make it to the symposium. She sent me a link to her slides and I’ve seen her speak before. I’ve even discussed her research in my post about the beef industry.


Dr. Jude Capper

According to Dr. Capper, animal agriculture contributes to 3.1% of the total US carbon footprint. I love the analogy she uses to explain the environmental impact of animal agriculture. She compares two vehicles; the first gets 5 miles per gallon, the second gets 35 miles per gallon. You automatically think that the first vehicle is an environmental nightmare and the second is a much more environmentally-friendly choice. But wait… the first vehicle is a bus carrying 50 passengers and the second is a car carrying 4. That means, that for a 350 mile trip, the bus can carry 50 passengers, getting 250 people miles per gallon, whereas the car only carries 4 and gets 140 people miles per gallon. Now, which one is better for the environment?

The same rules need to be applied to animal agriculture. The more productive an animal is, the smaller its impact on the environment.

Dr. Capper goes on to compare animal agriculture of today (her data is based on numbers from 2007) to that of 30 years ago (1977). One cow of today produces 131% of the beef that one cow would have produced 30 years ago, and each pound of beef produced requires only 81% of the feed, 86% of the water, and 66% of the land a pound of beef required thirty years ago. Using our modern practices, farmers today are producing more beef and using fewer animals and less natural resources. She goes on to say that a pound of beef today results in 80% of the manure, 80% of the methane, 89% of the nitrous oxide and has 82% of the carbon footprint that a pound of beef had in 1977.

The carbon footprint of animal agriculture will decrease when animals breed and have babies as often as possible, when they are healthy and free of disease, and they will produce much more food with improved genetics. (In animal agriculture, when we talk about improving genetics, we are not talking about creating GMO animals. We are simply talking about breeding the best to the best and getting babies that are even better. Some scientists can use the animal’s DNA to tell them which animals carry the best genes and use them to decide which animals to use for breeding.)

Dr. Capper is a big proponent of using technologies to increase the amount of food each animal produces, including feeding animals in feedlots as well as utilizing antibiotics, hormones, and beta agonists. These have such a positive impact on productivity that one cow raised using them would produce enough extra beef to feed seven children with school lunches for a whole year! Some of these technologies are banned in Europe, but that decision results in 244 million metric tons of extra beef that must be imported to European countries each year.

Many people think that producing animals using all grass systems would be better for the environment, but that is terribly inefficient. Animals fed only grass need about 7 more months of growing time to be ready for harvest and they are about 175 pounds lighter than those fed grain. If all US beef was produced on grass, we would need 131 million more acres of land (75% of the size of Texas) and 468 billion more gallons of water (equivalent to that used by 53.1 million US households).

When you consider how large the global food supply is and how diverse the farming practices are, it’s easy to see how small changes to improve productivity can make huge differences in the amount of total food produced. Just controlling parasites in a small, 35-cow herd can result in enough extra beef to supply 19 families with their annual beef demand. Worldwide, disease in animals causes a 20% loss.

The next speaker at the symposium (really the first speaker since Jude couldn’t make it) was Dr. Frank Mitloehner. It was great to see Dr. Mitloehner at Alltech. He was a graduate student at Texas Tech when I was an undergraduate and was the teaching assistant in some of my classes. Dr. Mitloehner is now a leading researcher in animal agriculture and its impact on the environment. He uses the term ‘sustainable intensification’ when he discusses improving the impact of animal agriculture on the environment. 


Dr. Frank Mitloehner

He told us that the global population will triple in his lifetime and most of the human population growth will occur in the developing world. Farmers will have to produce enough food to feed 9 billion people by 2050 and they will have about the same or maybe a little less land than they have today. So efficiency is key. In the US, we have the most efficient food system in the world, meaning that our farmers produce the most meat, milk and eggs using fewer natural resources than anywhere else in the world. It takes 5 cows in Mexico to make the same amount of milk that one cow can produce in the US. That’s 4 more cows eating feed and hay, drinking water and pooping.

Developing countries are really far behind in animal husbandry, and that’s understandable. Dr. Mitloehner stated that the best way to improve the environmental impact of animal agriculture worldwide would be to help these developing countries produce food more efficiently. In the developed world, he says that the environmental impact could be improved by learning ways to utilize animal waste to produce energy. (Some farmers already capture the gasses from their manure to produce electricity.)

Now, we know that being more productive and producing more food is good for farmers, but some countries even take it one step further. The next speaker was Aidan Cotter from the Irish Food Board. He told us about a program in Ireland, called Origin Green that measures the carbon footprint of individual farms in Ireland and allows them to compare themselves to other farmers.



They measure the inputs and outputs of each farm and grant sustainable accreditation to farmers that are producing efficiently. Their accreditation focuses not only on carbon produced, but also measures efficiency of production, like how often the cows calve, how young they are when they have their first calf, how heavy the calves are at weaning, and how efficiently they gain. If a farmer needs a boost in efficiency, the program works with them to help them improve their farm. This accreditation is quite lucrative because beef factories pay a premium for cattle from farms that are certified as sustainable. The supermarkets that sell the beef in Europe demand beef that is produced sustainably.

During the question and answer period, Dr. Mitloehner brought up a point that I think is very important. In developed countries like the USA, 1/3 of the food we produce goes into a landfill. All the food that is wasted contributes to greenhouse gas production and the national carbon footprint, but it isn’t used. That is such a travesty. Both Dr. Capper and I have since written blog posts about food waste.

I hope this post was helpful. I really think that the impact of animal agriculture on the environment is something that is largely misunderstood. Please comment if you have any questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does.

Both Dr. Capper and Dr. Mitloehner have been interviewed in the Meat Mythcrusher video series and their videos have some great insight into their research.