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The food-feed competition is one of the complex challenges, and so are the ongoing climate change, land degradation and water shortage for realizing sustainable food production systems. By 2050 the global demand for animal products is projected to increase by 60% to 70%, and developing countries will have a lion’s share in this increase. Currently, ~800 million tonnes of cereals (one-third of total cereal production) are used in animal feed and by 2050 it is projected to be over 1.1 billion tonnes. Most of the increase in feed demand will be in developing countries, which already face many food security challenges. Additional feed required for the projected increased demand of animal products, if met through food grains, will further exacerbate the food insecurity in these countries. Furthermore, globally, the production, processing and transport of feed account for 45% of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector. This paper presents approaches for addressing these challenges in quest for making livestock sector more sustainable. The use of novel human-inedible feed resources such as insect meals, leaf meals, protein isolates, single cell protein produced using waste streams, protein hydrolysates, spineless cactus, algae, co-products of the biofuel industry, food wastes among others, has enormous prospects. Efficient use of grasslands also offers possibilities for increasing carbon sequestration, land reclamation and livestock productivity. Opportunities also exist for decreasing feed wastages by simple and well proven practices such as use of appropriate troughs, increase in efficiency of harvesting crop residues and their conversion to complete feeds especially in the form of densified feed blocks or pellets, feeding as per the nutrient requirements, among others. Available evidence have been presented to substantiate arguments that: (a) for successful and sustained adoption of a feed technology, participation of the private sector and a sound business plan are required, (b) for sustainability of the livestock production systems, it is also important to consider the consumption of animal products and a case has been presented to assess future needs of animal source foods based on their requirements for healthy living, (c) for dairy animals, calculation of Emission Intensity based on the lifetime lactation rather than one lactation may also be considered and (d) for assessment of the efficiency of livestock production systems a holistic approach is required that takes into consideration social dimensions and net human-edible protein output from the system in addition to carbon and water footprints.

The drive to increase the output of animal product in some sectors of ruminant livestock production has led to greater use of feeds such as cereal grains and soyabean meal that are potentially human-edible. This trend has caused concern since, by so doing, ruminants compete not only with monogastric livestock but also with the human population for a limited global area of cultivatable land on which to produce grain crops. Reasons for using potentially human-edible feeds in ruminant diets include increased total daily energy intake, greater supply of essential amino acids and improved ruminal balance between fermentable energy and degradable protein. Soyabean meal, produced on land that has been in arable cultivation for many years can fulfil a useful role as a supplier of undegraded dietary protein in diets for high-yielding dairy cows. However, in the context of sustaining the production of high-quality foods from livestock to meet the demands of a growing human population, the use of potentially human-edible feed resources by livestock should be restricted to livestock with the highest daily nutrient requirements; that is, potentially human-edible feed inputs should be constrained to meeting requirements for energy and protein and to rectifying imbalances in nutrient supply from pastures and forage crops such as high concentrations of nitrogen (N). There is therefore a role for human-edible feeds in milk production because forage-only systems are associated with relatively low output per head and also low N use efficiency compared with systems with greater reliance on human-edible feeds. Profitability on farm is driven by control of input costs as well as product value and examples are given of low-cost bovine milk and meat production with little or no reliance on potentially human-edible feeds. In beef production, the forage-only systems currently under detailed real-time life-cycle analysis at the North Wyke Farm Platform, can sustain high levels of animal growth at low feed cost. The potential of all-forage diets should be demonstrated for a wide range of ruminant milk and meat production systems. The challenge for the future development of ruminant systems is to ensure that potentially human-edible feeds, or preferably human-inedible by-products if available locally, are used to complement pastures and forage crops strategically rather than replace them.

As the global population increases and the economy grows rapidly, the demand for livestock products such as meat, egg and milk continue to increase. The shortage of feed in livestock production is a worldwide problem restricting the development of the animal industry. Natural woody plants are widely distributed and have a huge biomass yield. The fresh leaves and branches of some woody plants are rich in nutrients such as proteins, amino acids, vitamins and minerals and can be used to produce storage feed such as silage for livestock. Therefore, the development and utilization of natural woody plants for clean fermented feed is important for the sustainable production of livestock product. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the research progress, current status and development prospects of forageable natural woody plant feed resources. The nutritional composition and uses of natural woody plants, the main factors affecting the fermentation of woody plant silage and the interaction mechanism between microbial co-occurrence network and secondary metabolite are reviewed. Various preparation technologies for clean fermentation of woody plant silage were summarized comprehensively, which provided a sustainable production mode for improving the production efficiency of livestock and producing high-quality livestock product. Therefore, woody plants play an increasingly important role as a potential natural feed resource in alleviating feed shortage and promoting sustainable development of livestock product.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights that we exist in a global community. From a single city, it spread to 188 countries across the world and infected 30 million people by September 18, 2020. Decades of modeling pandemics predicted potential consequences, but COVID-19's impact on the food supply chain, and specifically livestock production was unexpected. Clusters of cases among workers in meat processing plants evolved quickly to affect human, animal, and environmental welfare in several countries. In processing plants, the hygiene focus is on product quality and food safety. Because of their close proximity to one another, COVID-19 spread rapidly between workers and the lack of sick leave and health insurance likely resulted in workers continuing to work when infectious. In the United States (U.S.) many processing plants shut down when they identified major outbreaks, putting pressure especially on pig and poultry industries. At one point, there was a 45% reduction in pig processing capacity meaning about 250,000 pigs per day were not slaughtered. This resulted in longer transport distances to plants in operation with extra capacity, but also to crowding of animals on farm. Producers were encouraged to slow growth rates, but some had to cull animals on farm in ways that likely included suffering and caused considerable upset to owners and workers. Carcass disposal was also associated with potential biosecurity risks and detrimental effects on the environment. Hence, this is a One Welfare issue, affecting human, animal, and environmental welfare and highlighting the fragility of intensive, high-throughput livestock production systems. This model needs to be re-shaped to include the animal, human, and environmental elements across the farm to fork chain. Such a One Welfare approach will ensure that food production systems are resilient, flexible, and fair in the face of future challenges.

• Manure utilization is hindered by separate specialist crop and livestock production systems. • Improving manure utilization requires organizations for manure exchange. • Policies and action plans for improving manure utilization are critically reviewed. • A manure chain approach with third-party contractors is recommended. Livestock numbers in China have more than tripled between 1980 and 2017. The increase in the number of intensive livestock production systems has created the challenges of decoupled crop and livestock systems, low utilization of manures in croplands, and subsequent environmental pollution. Correspondingly, the government has enacted a series of policies and regulations to increase the sustainability of livestock production. This paper reviews the objectives of these policies and regulations and their impacts on manure management. Since 2017 there have been two policy guides to speed up the appropriate use of manures, three action plans for increasing manure recycling, and one technical guide to calculate nutrient balances. Requirements of manure pollution control and recycling for improved environmental performance of livestock production systems were included in three revised environmental laws. Most recent survey data indicate that the utilization of livestock manures was 70% in 2017, including that used as fertilizer and/or for production of energy. The targets for manure utilization are 75% in 2020 and 90% in 2035. To achieve these targets and promote ‘green livestock production’, additional changes are needed including the use of third-party enterprises that facilitate manure exchange between farms and a more integrated manure nutrient management approach.

This study systematically reviews the peer-reviewed literature on livestock production and food security in urbanizing environments of developing countries to synthesize the existing evidence and identify priorities for future research. Specifically, a systematic literature review was undertaken using PubMed, ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases over the period 1980–2017, resulting in a final number of 72 articles meeting our selection criteria. The results revealed a fragmentation in the literature, which draws from a very small number of studies, and is positioned in widely varied research areas, environments, livestock systems and consumption patterns. With such heterogeneity, drawing generalizations from the literature may be unreachable. Furthermore, the literature is largely qualitative in nature, with very few comprehensive models to capture and integrate empirical evidence. Food security was typically found to be narrowly defined, focusing primarily on interlinks with livestock supply. Considerably less attention has been given to other relevant dimensions of food security, such as accessibility, utilization and stability. Another important finding of relevance to food security is a need to address the “missing middle” in livestock value chains since the literature has customarily concentrated extensively on the two ends of the livestock value chain, i.e., on production and consumption, while widely ignoring other elements and actors along the value chain. A further focus on the interrelationships between livestock production, food security and urbanization in developing countries through a holistic and interdisciplinary approach is recommended. Particularly, future research aiming to understand livestock systems in the context of rapid urbanization should put more emphasis on addressing the full continuum of the livestock value chain and the four dimensions that drive food security in developing countries and how they possibly interrelate.

Climate change poses escalating threats to livestock production systems globally, with extreme weather events including intensified heat waves and cold spells increasingly compromising animal productivity, reproductive performance, and resource availability. The Murrah buffalo, a high-yielding dairy breed central to India’s national milk output, remains particularly vulnerable in Haryana’s Trans-Gangetic Plain, where climatic extremes are pronounced yet breed-specific sensitivity assessments are largely absent. This study employed the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multi-criteria decision-making framework, to systematically quantify farmers’ perceived climate change sensitivity across the Murrah buffalo-based livestock production system. A total of 320 farmers were surveyed across eight agro-ecologically representative blocks in Haryana. Eight primary indicators and 35 sub-indicators were identified and prioritized through pairwise comparisons. Results revealed that type of farming system was the most critical sensitivity indicator (priority weight = 0.23), with the specialized crop-based farming system sub-indicator carrying the highest global priority (0.10). Reproductive performance (0.18) and feed availability (0.16) emerged as the next most sensitive indicators, followed by impacts on milk yield, conception rates, vector-borne disease prevalence, water resource availability, and agro biodiversity. These findings highlight the deeply interconnected nature of climate vulnerabilities within Murrah buffalo husbandry and underscore the urgency of transitioning toward diversified, climate-resilient farming models. The AHP-derived priority framework offers a replicable, evidence-based tool for policymakers and extension services to target adaptation interventions in heat-stressed, smallholder dairy systems.

The discovery of the growth promoting effects of antibiotics in the 1940s contributed to the economic efficacy of the livestock industry. In response to increased animal protein demand from the 1950s, antimicrobial use at sub-therapeutic levels for growth promotion and disease prevention (antimicrobial growth promoter, AGP) improved feed-to-weight ratio, meat quality and overall health of livestock. These benefits encouraged the heavy use of AGPs such that about 70% of global use of antimicrobials was for food animals. Despite the numerous benefits of AGPs, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) associated with their use and impact on human and livestock health, establishes AMR as a global health plague, affecting man, animal and the environment. Although many countries have banned the use of AGPs in livestock production, efforts to identify effective alternatives have yielded inconsistent findings and only few effective alternative products are currently available. This highlights the need to intensify efforts toward identifying more effective AGP alternatives. While current strategies focus on evaluating the efficacy of single products/class of products that can enhance productivity and health, future strategies should focus on combining multiple approaches. It is also important to acknowledge that no single alternative can fully replicate the same mechanism of action attributed to antimicrobials. This comprehensive review presents recent research findings on AGP use trend before and after bans in many countries, the benefit/mode of action of reported AGP alternatives, the economic impact of AGP alternatives in the context of the One Health approach, the factors militating the search for effective AGP alternatives, research gaps and future action plans for AGP-free animal farm management.

The present study has mapped the hot spots vulnerable to changing climate and identified the underlying driving indicators in subtropical Trans and Upper Gangetic plains (TUGP) of India. The long-term trends indicate that the area between latitude 25 and 28° N has been more exposed to adverse climatic changes especially rise in maximum summer/monsoon and minimum winter temperatures. The more predominant correlates of vulnerability in the region come not from the exposure to adverse meteorological conditions but from prevailing socio-economic conditions (adaptive capacity) and the increased environmental pressure (sensitivity). Among the top 40 most vulnerable districts in the TUGP, in about two-third, the exposure was at moderate to low level, but sensitivity was high and adaptive capacity very weak. Among the sensitivity indicators, the factor loadings, obtained through modified principal component technique, were high for average size of landholdings, Temperature Humidity Index load and productivity of paddy and wheat crops. Irrigation intensity, farm mechanization, cropping intensity, livestock density, proportion of milch animals stock, rural literacy rate and veterinary institutions were the critical factors in determining the adaptive capacity of a district. The study outlines range of research and policy imperatives for enhancing resilience of crop–livestock production system.

Livestock production systems are complex and evolve over time, affecting their adaptability to economic, political, and disease-related changes. In Europe, disease resilience is crucial due to threats like the African swine fever virus, which jeopardizes pork production stability. The European Union identifies farm production type as a key risk factor for disease spread, making it important to track changes in farm production types to assess disease risk. However, detailed production type data is often lacking in national databases. For Swiss pig farms, we used prediction and clustering algorithms to classify 9’687 − 11’247 trading farms between 2014 and 2019 by one of eleven production types. We then analyzed the pig trade network and stratified farm centrality measures (ICC and OCC) by production type. We found that 145 farms belonging to three production types have substantially higher ICC and OCC than other farms, suggesting that they could be the target of disease surveillance programs. Our predictions until 2025 show an increase both in overall pig trade network connectivity and in proportion of production types with high ICC and OCC, indicating that the structural changes in the Swiss pig production system may increase infectious disease exposure over time.