If livestock slaughter waste is no longer allowed to be fed to animals in the wake of the BSE crisis, the alternatives are few and expensive.
In the United States, 6.7 billion pounds of meat and bone meal and 120 million lb. of blood meal are produced every year as a byproduct of the packing industry.
Mark Jekanowski of the Sparks Companies in McLean, Virginia, and a former United States Department of Agriculture official, says his study for the rendering industry on how to dispose of slaughter waste, indicates North America could handle the material but that landfills would be the dubious benefactor.
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He was speaking at the meeting of the Canadian Society for Animal Science in Saskatoon last week.
Since 1997, bovine waste meals have not been allowed into the ruminant feed chain, but continue to be made into poultry and pet food.
The poultry industry consumes 43 percent of all meals, with 23 percent going to pet food and 10 percent for calf milk replacer using only pork and poultry meals.
Jekanowski said rendered proteins could be replaced with high protein soybean meal and corn gluten.
“The big problem would be what to do if we couldn’t feed any bovine or worse yet, any MBM (meat and bone material) or blood meal at all,” he said.
“You can’t be exporting it. It isn’t going to be a popular commodity. If we place restrictions on it, the rest of the world will follow suit.”
If ruminants were restricted from consuming any meat or bone meal from any other species, “something that might happen if there is enough political pressure, then it would cost the livestock industry $100 million (US) annually,” said Jekanowski.
If all animals were restricted from consuming any ruminant material, it would cost $636 million.
“It there was a total ban on feeding any rendered material to any animal – and this wouldn’t make much sense for the United States to do this but science isn’t always the basis for every decision made by a government – it would cost $1.5 billion annually.”
That doesn’t include retooling costs for renderers, which will still be needed to shrink and stabilize the material and problems with landfill space, he said.
“The livestock industry and consumer would have to eat those costs, so returns to growers would have to fall and costs to consumers would need to rise. Right now renderers pay for material. It would become a service, charged back to packers.”
He said in the coming year there will likely be U.S. regulations that stop the feeding of cervid carcass renderings, prevent all brain and spinal column material from ending up in feed and ban the feeding of poultry litter to ruminants.
