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A 12% switch from monogastric to ruminant livestock production can reduce emissions and boost crop production for 525 million people

Nature Food volume 3, pages 1040–1051 (2022)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 January 2023

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Abstract

Ruminants have lower feed use efficiency than monogastric livestock, and produce higher reactive nitrogen and methane emissions, but can utilize human-inedible biomass through foraging and straw feedstock. Here we conduct a counterfactual analysis, replacing ruminants with monogastric livestock to quantify the changes in nitrogen loss and greenhouse gas emissions globally from a whole life cycle perspective. Switching 12% of global livestock production from monogastric to ruminant livestock could reduce nitrogen emissions by 2% and greenhouse gas emissions by 5% due to land use change and lower demand for cropland areas for ruminant feed. The output from released cropland could feed up to 525 million people worldwide. More ruminant products, in addition to optimized management, would generate overall benefits valued at US$468 billion through reducing adverse impacts on human and ecosystem health, and mitigating climate impacts.

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Fig. 1: Cropland area for producing feed required by per unit livestock protein and feed ratio for ruminant and monogastric livestock.
Fig. 2: Nitrogen budget and carbon emissions in global ruminants and monogastric livestock systems with the same amount of protein produced.
Fig. 3: Global changes in Nr and GHG emissions when replacing ruminants with monogastric livestock by region and by livestock systems.
Fig. 4: Optimizing livestock system to reduce Nr and GHG emissions under different scenarios.
Fig. 5: Costs and benefits under assumed scenarios.

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Data availability

Data supporting the findings of this study are available within the Article, a separate source data file and its Supplementary Information files. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

No code is used in this research. The spatial analysis is run in ArcGIS v.10.2.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42261144001 and 42061124001), the National Key Research and Development Project of China (2022YFD1700700) and the Pioneer and Leading Goose R&D Programme of Zhejiang (2022C02008). This work is a contribution from Activity 1.4 to the ‘Towards the International Nitrogen Management System’ project (INMS, http://www.inms.international/) funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Luxi Cheng, Xiuming Zhang, Jianming Xu & Baojing Gu

  2. Policy Simulation Laboratory, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Luxi Cheng, Chenchen Ren & Baojing Gu

  3. School of Agriculture and Food, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Xiuming Zhang

  4. UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Penicuik, UK

    Stefan Reis

  5. University of Exeter Medical School, Knowledge Spa, Truro, UK

    Stefan Reis

  6. The University of Edinburgh, School of Chemistry, Edinburgh, UK

    Stefan Reis

  7. Department of Land Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Chenchen Ren

  8. Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Agricultural Resources and Environment, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jianming Xu

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  1. Luxi Cheng
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Contributions

B.G. designed the study. L.C. performed the research. X.Z. analysed economic-related data. L.C. prepared the distribution maps. L.C. and B.G. wrote the paper, S.R., X.Z. and C.R. revised the paper and all other authors contributed to the discussion of the paper.

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Correspondence to Baojing Gu.

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Nature Food thanks Xuejun Liu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1

The N proportion of dry matter components in different livestock feed.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Area of cropland required to produce the feed per unit of ruminant protein.

The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Area of cropland required to produce the feed per unit of monogastric protein.

The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Nr emission intensity of ruminants and monogastric livestock at each stage.

The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 5 GHG emission intensity of ruminants and monogastric livestock at each stage.

The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 6 Change ratio in Nr and GHG emissions at all stages after monogastric livestock replacing ruminants.

a, the change ratio of Nr emissions at feed production stage. b, the change ratio of Nr emissions at livestock raising stage. c, the change ratio of GHG emissions at feed production stage. d, the change ratio of GHG emissions at livestock raising stage. The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 7 N-Protein amounts of ruminants and monogastric livestock for BAU and SYS scenario and the increase ratio of ruminant production for the SYS and SYS2 scenarios.

a and b are ruminant and monogastric N-protein in the BAU scenario, respectively. c and d are ruminant and monogastric N-protein in the SYS scenario, respectively. e and f are the increase ratio of ruminant protein in the SYS and SYS2 scenario, respectively. The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 8 The saved grain N, cropland area and more population from saved land under the SYS and SYS2 scenarios.

The SYS and ALL scenarios have the same area of saved land because there were not potentials for saved cropland under the FED scenario. The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Extended Data Fig. 9 Regional gas emission reduction ratio under each scenario.

a, Regional nitrogen emission reduction rates under assumed different scenarios. b, Regional GHG emission reduction rates under assumed scenario. The division of regions is based on the GLEAM model.

Extended Data Fig. 10 Global grassland cover share and grass degradation adjustment rate (DAR).

a is derived from GLC-SHARE Beta-Release 1.0 database-2014(https://data.apps.fao.org/map/catalog/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/ba4526fd-cdbf-4028-a1bd-5a559c4bff38). It shows the grassland share of each country and is used as the basis for setting the DAR (b). The base map was applied without endorsement using data from the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org/).

Supplementary information

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Supplementary text, discussion, Figs. 1 and 2, Tables 1–6 and references.

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Cheng, L., Zhang, X., Reis, S. et al. A 12% switch from monogastric to ruminant livestock production can reduce emissions and boost crop production for 525 million people. Nat Food 3, 1040–1051 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00661-1

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