Our ancestors speak to us through native breeds. We should listen.

How can native farm animals play an important role in a sustainable food system?

Modern diets are in one sense highly varied and people expect a wide range of foodstuffs all year round. But the variation and the enormous choice are to some extent illusions. In a well-stocked shop you may be able to choose between 40,000 products in colorful packages. But most of the food consumed is made up of just a few raw materials, wheat, rice, soy, corn, sugar and vegetable oil. Even a big share of the meat, in particular chicken and pork, is also produced with these as main inputs. Simultaneously, the regional differences in diets are waning and something like a global diet has emerged. This is of course only a reflection of that food production has been homogenized and standardized with similar machinery, fertilizers, feed, knowledge systems, seeds and breeds. This is the reason for why most dairy cows are Holstein and why basically all broilers in Sweden are Ross 308.

This also means that beef, wheat, apples, mutton or milk are much more similar today than fifty years ago, regarding how they are produced, their nutritional value and how they actually taste.

Instead of being upcyclers of leftovers, by-products and grass, farm animals have become a resource consuming part of a linear food system where a huge variety and quantity of inputs is brought into the system and huge quantities are sold. Apart from the physical changes in breeds and production system this commodification has huge impacts on the culture around livestock keeping, where all perspectives besides the dominating economic are reduced.

By Jorchr - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

In particular for the monogastric animals, the linkage to the local ecology and culture is totally absent and they are produced with very similar systems and breeds all over the world. The natural processes of animals, such as their digestion, respiration, smell or sounds are what economists call externalities, causing problems. Even manure, under some conditions perhaps as valuable as the meat, has become an environmental hazard in many places.

In that world, there is little space or need for native farm animals* and the local cultural, social and ecological context that they are part of. If not extinct already, their role has been reduced into being a living gene pool, tools for ecosystem management or being part of the growing tourism industry.

Environmental, biological, economic, social and geopolitical shocks and stresses make the global food system vulnerable to disruption. The last years have reminded us of this in very direct ways. The food system itself is also a threat to food security and resilience. It has a considerably negative impact on the environment through emissions, erosion, pollution and relocation of nutrients. The dislocation of livestock and feed production is one of the major cause of these negative impacts.

An even bigger threat is caused by the hyper-connectivity that spreads shocks instantly to the whole system. A ship stuck in a canal, a war in a bread basket or rising oil prices send shockwaves to all corners of the world.

The hyper connectivity is also felt by the farmers. Through global markets they are competing with millions of farmers producing the same commodities which are bought by a small number of food industries and retailers. We are told that the food system is shaped by consumer demand, but this is clearly not the case. Certainly, no consumers have urged the farmers to lock up the animals indoors, feed them with soy, or use pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The producer price of milk in Sweden and Denmark is not determined by the local conditions or the demand by Swedish or Danish consumers but by the price set twice per month at the Global Diary Trade auctions.

Willard Cochrane, head agricultural economist at the US Department of Agriculture, in 1958 coined the expression the “agriculture technology treadmill”. The treadmill starts when a small number of farmers adopt a new technology. These farmers make profits for a short while because their production costs are lower than for other farmers. As more farmers adopt the new technology, overall production goes up, prices go down, and profits are no longer possible – even with the lower production costs. Consequently, new technology must be adopted to make profits possible again. Those farmers who do not adopt the new technologies will be squeezed out of the market. And so it goes on again and again: there is no end point where production is rationalized enough or when costs are low enough. Essentially, this is also the mechanism behind the replacement of native breeds with a few global breeds.

I recently completed a report for the WWF on the use of feed in Swedish livestock production (Rundgren 2023) and concluded that there is a reversed relationship between the feed use expressed as feed used per kg of meat or milk and the efficiency in the delivery of human edible protein. A more intensive feed regime will use less feed, but it will use a higher quality of feed, turning the conversion of human edible protein into a loss. This is true both within species but also in comparisons between the different species. Ruminants are thus better converters of human edible protein than monogastrics. Grassfed ruminants use huge quantities of feed, but they are better human edible protein converters than those getting grain and soy.

Other research shows that this also holds in a global context, where backyard chicken or pigs produce 1 kg of human edible protein from 0.1 kg of human edible protein in feed compared to industrial systems where the amount of human edible protein in feed is 3-5 times higher than the amount in the meat or egg (Mottet et al 2017). This also reflects the difference between the systems under which the native farm animals developed and the systems of modern product-maximizing breeds.

Energy scarcity, climate shocks, a deteriorating global trade system and lack of trust in what can be called the modern project will to some extent mean a revival for the local and regional. This has been visible in the gastronomy for more than a decade already. It is also visible in politics. Countries depending on imports for their food supply feel vulnerable. During the pandemic, it was apparent that many food exporters also were harmed by collapsing trade. In addition, some countries depending on exports of agriculture commodities, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, impose restrictions on the production for environmental reasons.

Just a few days ago, a public inquiry in Sweden recommended that the municipalities will get a legal responsibility for the supply of food to the population in times of crisis. This is just one of many signals that the trust in the global food system is falling and that a resilient and localized food system is moving up on the agenda. For sure, there are aspects of this renewed interest in the local or national which are less appealing, in particular xenophobia, chauvinism and militarism.

But by and large, I believe it is a positive thing to reconnect people, food and agriculture to the landscapes. We can clearly see in various cultural expressions how people are longing for a re-establishment of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Food and agriculture are the main links between humans and the rest of nature, so it is logical to start there.  We should promote a landscape diet, rooted in local conditions, instead of the dominating narratives of a global diet promoted with arguments of health or even environment.

The complexity of the global human economy is built on the simplification of local natural systems reducing them to economic purpose, to money. The value of people and animals in this global economy is their ability to convert nature resources into products to be sold.

If buzzwords such as circular economy, regenerative agriculture or multifunctional agriculture should have any meaning, industrial livestock production will be phased-out. Native farm animals have a meaningful role to play in the transformation of the globalized food system driven by economics into landscape based food systems driven by ecology. They are productive when productivity is measured in efficient use and regeneration of local resources and not in kilos per day or tons per labor units, and they have many other values which are not primarily economic.

Some native farm animals can have an exceptional quality of meat, milk, pelt, wool or leather and some are resistant to disease or are able to thrive on coarse feed. And for sure, they can be very useful for landscape management. That is all well, but the value of native breeds cannot primarily be expressed in economic or utilitarian terms. The biggest value of the native farm breeds is about relationship between humans, the agroecosystem, the culture and the local natural world that we are part of. They also roots us in history; our ancestors speak to us through them. We should listen.

* Native farm animals are farm animal populations that have adapted to local conditions, including traditional agricultural production systems and environments. They originate from certain geographical regions, are adapted to these regions’ environmental conditions, and are often utilized therein. Terms like native breeds, native domestic breeds, landrace or indigenous breeds are also used with more or less the same meaning.   

Mottet et al 2017, Livestock: On our plates or eating at our table? A new analysis of the feed food debate, Global Food Security 14 (2017) 1–8.

Rundgren, Gunnar 2023, The use of feed for the production of meat, egg and cheese in Sweden, WWF Sweden

Speech at the Nordgen conference Milestones, challenges, and Nordic collaboration of livestock conservation in Uppsala 7-8 February 2024.