In this Feed & Grain Chat, Lara Moody, executive director of the Institute for Feed Education and Research (IFEEDER) discusses the foundation's significant growth in recent years and its impact on the feed industry. She highlights IFEEDER's increased project funding, development of sustainability resources like the defining of 16 material issues and progress in life cycle assessment (LCA) tools. She also previews upcoming reports on feed ingredient consumption and pet food trends, which will reveal interesting findings in circularity by species, and changes in soybean meal and DDGS inclusion rates.
Transcript of Feed & Grain Chat with Lara Moody, executive director of the Institute for Feed Education and Research (IFEEDER)
Elise Schafer, editor of Feed & Grain: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Feed & Grain Chat. I'm your host Elise Schafer, editor of Feed & Grain. This edition of Feed & Grain Chat is brought to you by WATT Global Media and Feedandgrain.com. Feedandgrain.com is your source for the latest news, product and equipment information for the grain handling and feed manufacturing industries.
Today I'm joined by Lara Moody, executive director of the Institute for Feed Education and Research. She's here to tell us how IFEEDER is leading the way in feed industry sustainability. Hi, Lara, thanks for joining me today.
Lara Moody, executive director of IFEEDER: Hey, Elise, thanks for having me on this morning.
Schafer: Absolutely! Now, 2024 was a year of achievements for IFEEDER. Can you tell me what the most significant one was and how this will shape the foundation's direction moving forward?
Moody: Yeah, you know, I put some thought into this, and IFEEDER, as everyone knows, is the research and education foundation that supports the American feed industry. And we in 2021 implemented a set of strategic goals for IFEEDER. And those goals included us broadening our reach and broadening our scope of funding and broadening the work that we were doing. And so the biggest accomplishment, I think, that we recognized this year was that in 2021 we had $2.1 million in active projects underway within IFEEDER, and 80% of those projects were being funded by animal feed and pet food industry members. And this year, when we were taking an assessment of where we were in our strategic plan, we realized the growth that we've had within IFEEDER.
And so this year, we have $4.8 million in active projects. So almost doubling, more than doubling, the amount of projects we have underway. 40% of the funding is coming from industry members, and the other 60% is coming from partners and grant supporters. So that's really valuable for the feed industry because it means that we can continue to grow and do more and more to invest in the industry and to support its research, either through targeted research efforts like the amino acid and vitamin project that we're just kicking off this month, or doing more educational programs in the sustainability space, like we're doing today. That that one piece isn't a particular project. It's instead the overall operating and functioning of IFEEDER that's allowing us to do more for the industry.
Schafer: The Sustainability Toolkit now offers resources on 16 material issues for the feed industry. Can you share more about the process of identifying those issues and how they can help stakeholders with their sustainability journeys?
Moody: So as you identified, one of the resources we developed this year was on materiality and material issues for the feed industry, and just for a definition for those listening, materiality is the threshold at which certain issues become relevant enough that a company wants to report on them, and so when you're identifying issues as material, it means that you've recognized it's important to stakeholders that could be internal or external. It's something that you want to set a benchmark for so that you can aim for continuous improvement, and that it's something that you are measuring and reporting progress on.
And we identified these 16 material issues that we felt, and I shouldn't just say we as IFEEDER, but we as a collective of about 25 different feed industry members, identified those as important to the industry, and then we gathered information to identify their importance, their value, why an industry member would care about them, and then examples of what feed industry members were doing to actually accommodate those.
When an entity is starting down their sustainability journey, doing a materiality assessment is a common place to start, and it essentially means taking a look at issues that are important to you, either through a survey of internal employees or a survey of internal and external stakeholders, and identifying which ones are important to you, and then taking those steps to benchmark and then track progress in those areas. And so the resources that we provided is a starting place for industry members to do that.
Schafer: Now, IFEEDER has been on the forefront of developing life cycle assessment (LCA) resources for the feed industry. What challenges do companies face when implementing LCA tools, and how do IFEEDER's resources address those challenges?
Moody: Yeah, so I started seeing in the last year and a half a really significant increase in the number of animal feed and pet food industry members that were asking me questions about life cycle assessments because they had customers that were asking them about life cycle assessments for their different ingredients and products. I think the biggest challenge that folks face is how to get started, what decisions you need to make, how much resources you want to contribute to working in the LCA space. And so when we engaged industry members to survey them on their needs, and then began to develop materials they could use, one of the key pieces that we created was a decision tree for our industry members to use so that you could internally have the discussions that would then allow you to externally work with a consultant or other stakeholders on the process.
So, asking your team members questions about why are we doing this in the first place? Are we doing it because it's a strategic action that we want to take to better understand our own impacts of our ingredients, or are we doing it because a customer is asking for the information and we want to be able to better engage them and respond to them in those questions? Or is it because we have some regulatory needs, so maybe if you're somebody who's exporting into Europe, you're having to do it to apply to the EU regulations around foot printing. And so, that's an initial place to ask questions.
But then there are other things in the decision tree that would allow you to address — are you going to do all this internally? Are you going to do the work on your own? How many people do you have on your team that can put time and resources to that? Or are you better to go external and have a consultant come in and help you and work with your team on that? And what might that look like?
Then, the follow up question that I was getting from industry members is, who do we work with? Who should we go to have have an LCA done? And so, obviously, as as IFEEDER, and in my work with the American Feed Industry Association, the trade association, we're not in the business of telling folks who they should work with for specific projects. Instead, what we created was a resource or a directory of all the different practitioners in the space, what areas of work they're working on, how to contact them, so that we could give members a resource that they could use to navigate the space. So that's the type of information that's available in that LCA resource, and I think those are the key questions that our industry members are asking when they're just starting the process.
Schafer: Now recently, at IPPE, you previewed IFEEDER's forthcoming Feed Ingredient Consumption Report and the Pet Food Report. Can you give us a glimpse into any trends or highlights you'd like to share with us today?
Moody: The Feed Ingredient Consumption Report is really an interesting piece of work for the industry. We last did the report in 2019 or using 2019 data. At the time, the report included a list of 48 different ingredients in its assessment. And now, this renewed report has over 70 different ingredients in the assessment. So I think we're taking a deeper dive into some of the ingredients that the industry is using.
From a trend standpoint, you're going to see some shifts. As we all know, there's been a growth in the biofuels space, and so we're starting to see a shift in some of those inclusion rates. So, you see some increases in soybean meal inclusion rates and some decreases in, well, let's just say, some changes, depending on your species, in distillers grains. And so, I think some of those biofuels industry things are showing up in our ingredient report.
Interestingly, we added to the Ingredient Consumption Report a look at the circularity of ingredients, and in particular the circularity by species. And so your listeners may be interested to know that the most circular species that we feed, number one — aquaculture, number two — equine, and then number three — dairy. And I think folks would be surprised at that, because you think dairy, ruminant — the biggest circular and maybe consumer, but the report indicates that it's aquaculture and equine that lead the way. So I think those are interesting. Corn is still king. So, we've got 160 million tons of corn going to feed in the U.S., and our number one state is Iowa as a top feed consumer.
Relative to the Pet Food Report, also quite interesting. Of course, the ingredients that we use in pet food are much more diverse than the ingredients that we use in our animal feeds, and so we looked at 602 different ingredients in the Pet Food Report that included an assessment of 9.2 million tons of product and ingredients relatively about $13 billion worth of pet food was included in the assessment. And so, just from a species standpoint, we were looking at dogs and cats. The report, when you see it come out, looks not only at dry dog and wet dog food and dry cat and wet cat food, but also dog treats and cat treats, and so in that space, just some key I would say, findings are that dog food was the greatest amount of volume and of sales in the pet food space. So about 55% of all pet food sales for dog and cat were going to dry dog food, and that was about 38% of the sales volume. And then dry cat food was about 16% of the total volume and about 12% of the sales volume.
So, both of those reports will be coming out in the coming months. We expect we'll release them in February and March respectively. You can find information for those reports on IFEEDER.org, you'll you'll see them, of course, in the in the news releases, and folks can always follow the IFEEDER newsletter. So if you go to IFEEDER.org, you can sign up for our newsletter, and we'll, of course, have information about those two reports as they come out in the newsletter. So we look forward to providing more insights from those reports in the near future.
Schafer: Well, and we look forward to seeing those results. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today with us, Lara!
Moody: Thanks for having me on, Elise.
Schafer: That's all for today's Feed & Grain Chat. If you'd like to hear more about IFEEDER, be sure to read the January edition with Lara's article about IFEEDER in sustainability. And if you'd like to see more videos like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel, sign up for the Industry Watch daily eNewsletter, or go to FeedandGrain.com and search for videos. Thank you again for joining, and we hope to see you next time!