Feed has a major bearing on animal health and welfare. It’s also often the largest cost in livestock production and is increasingly under the spotlight for its substantial environmental impacts.

The challenge

What we choose to feed livestock matters because it relates to how we manage about half of the agricultural land on the planet, 80 percent of which is grasslands. In our oceans, over a fifth of wild catch goes into feed – depleting stocks, which itself contributes to climate change.

For greenhouse gas emissions, feed contributes to about 45% of the total impact related to livestock. Meeting future feed demand would require approximately 280 million hectares of additional land by 2030, which is impossible to meet with existing protein crop sources.

Concerted action to improve the impact of animal feed is a necessity, for all businesses in the livestock supply chain. 

Download the Feed Behind Our Food report

Our contribution

Organisations acting alone are unable to drive the change that’s needed across the feed system. Collaboration is crucial to support systems change, and on this basis, the Feed Compass collaboration was launched in 2017 by an ambitious and diverse international group of food and feed businesses, running till 2020.

Early in the project, we ran a global feed survey, exposing the challenges and solutions in scaling sustainable feed innovation. Three major barriers identified at this time included 1) the financial cost of novel feeds, 2) low awareness about feed sustainability and 3) a lack of methods for comparing how sustainable different types of feed are, across environmental, economic and social criteria. Responding to the energy and interests in our network, we concentrated our energy on the latter two barriers.

Our Feed Behind our Food report, launched in 2018, is a guide for retail and food service to act on feed, based on insights gathered through the collaboration.

The Feed Compass principles were developed by the cross-sector working group as a holistic set of criteria for sustainable feed that’s fit for the future. We showcased examples of how this can be applied practically by piloting it inside a select number of businesses to help shape their decision-making processes around sourcing and supply chains.

The Feed Compass collaboration convened companies to develop stronger, more ambitious commitments on feed and develop other market incentives to increase feed sustainability.  

Qualities of Sustainable Animal Feed:

The Feed Compass principles are designed to provide an easy-to-communicate, top-line method of evaluating feed sustainability and guiding decision making:

For more information, contact our Food team. 

Contact our Food team

Who was involved?

The Feed Compass project was led by an ambitious and diverse group of international retailers, food manufacturers, feed ingredient companies, innovators and NGOs from across the food system. It formed part of the Protein Challenge 2040 coalition. Our partners and supporters included:

More information

• Visit the Futures Centre to keep track of trends, insights and opportunities for the protein sector.
• See results of the Feed Survey
• For further reading on the Feed Compass explore our blog series: Part 1: Why pay attention to animal feed? | Part 2: Current action on feed sustainability | Part 3: Our work to shift the feed system