Lee Truelove, Head of Regenerative Farming at First Milk said the cooperative was working to support the supply chain to find a ‘route out of soya’.
“Is certified deforestation-free soya the end game? I suggest it isn’t,” he said. “Even if that soy is certified questions still exist about how it’s grown.
“We also need to think about ghost acres. It’s all very well being efficient on the farm, but that can be undermined by how many acres somewhere else in the world are needed to supply feed for the cows.”
The alternative was obvious, he said. “We’re talking about UK-grown proteins including beans, and we definitely support that at First Milk.” Feeding trials by First Milk producers had been positive and would be repeated this winter, he said.
“We’re going to expand it, but we do think the potential is there. As a dairy cooperative, we’re looking to help the supply chain because we do think there is a route out of soya.”
Jos Houdijk of SRUC said that faba beans were also viable as an alternative to soya for growing pigs and chickens, but processing made them better.
“If we dehull faba beans we lift the digestibility and the concentration of amino acids, and that gives us opportunity to increase soya replacement potential.”
An NCS trial using the bean variety Lynx, combined with dehulling and toasting, found that broilers (meat chickens) fed this variety up to 30% reached the same finished weights as those fed on soya, but with an improved feed conversion ratio.
“We produced these chickens with 68% less soya bean meal input and the carbon footprint saving was almost 40%,” he said.
Arable and poultry producer John Seed said he started looking to replace soya when the egg price was below the cost of production, but soon also saw the environmental cost. “Eighty-two per cent of the carbon emissions from my farm came from purchased feed and the soya predominantly.”
He praised the NCS Project, in which he is involved as a Pulse Pioneer, paid to carry out on-farm trials. Trialling new approaches can be both expensive and ‘heartbreaking’ he said. “You need to have government sponsored research like this.”
He found that by feeding beans, even at 10% he reduced emissions by about 400t/year.
Farmers shouldn’t be taking sole responsibility, he concluded. “We are the front line but we are dealing with the broken promises, the sudden loss of subsidy and trade deals favouring unsustainable imports.”
