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Transforming animal feed with sustainable practices and collaborations
19 Plays3 months ago
In the latest episode of the Feed & Grain Podcast, host Steven Kilger talks with Lara Moody, executive director of the Institute of Feed Education and Research (IFEEDER), about the organization's current projects and initiatives. Topics include the sustainability roadmap, ingredient consumption datasets, and the importance of communication in the feed industry. Moody highlights IFEEDER's mission to advance understanding and trust in the sustainable animal feed supply chain through research and education. Don't miss this insightful discussion on the future of animal feed and pet food industries.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, my name is Stephen Kilgour and I'm the managing editor of Feeding Grain magazine and host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues of hacking the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and outlet industries. Today's episode is brought to you by the Binwip from New Mat Systems. The powerful dual impact Binwip removes the toughest buildup and blockages in industrial storage silos without hazardous silo entry.
00:00:26
Speaker
Learn more today at binwhip.com.
iFeeder's Mission and Projects
00:00:29
Speaker
In today's episode, my guest, Laura Moody, executive director at the Institute of Feed Education and Research is here to talk about what projects the organization is working on for the animal feed industry.
00:00:40
Speaker
From the sustainability roadmap to the ingredient consumption data sets, iFeeder is working hard to give the industry the tools it needs to send out a positive message about itself. I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out with the podcast or listen to this in a podcasting app, please rate us and subscribe. If you're listening online, sign up for the Feeding Gray newsletter, Industry Watch, to see when all the newest podcasts drop and to stay up to date with all the latest news from around the industry. Now, on to the show.
00:01:09
Speaker
Hi Laura, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Steve, thanks so much for inviting me back to talk about iFeeder. Yeah, you're one of our returning guests and I always really appreciate you coming on here. iFeeder was new when I just started in the industry. I've kind of grown in the industry with iFeeder, so I'm always really interested in your guys' mission and your goal and how you're doing, because it just, you know, correlates with my own career. So it's always really nice from you guys.
00:01:36
Speaker
Excellent. I'm glad we can provide that kind of support for you, Steve. But for anyone who might not know iFeeder and what you guys do, can you talk a little bit about your mission and your support for the American feed industry? So iFeeder is the Institute for Feed Education and Research. It's the research and education foundation that supports the US feed industry. And we do work very closely with the American Feed Industry Association.
00:02:04
Speaker
Our mission is to advance understanding and trust in a sustainable animal feed and pet food supply chain through research and education. And we pursue that with contributions and grants and other awarded dollars from industry and stakeholders so that we can invest in the industry.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah. And you guys are doing more than you've ever done before. Someone once again, who's been following iFeeder for pretty much its entire existence. I mean, you guys seem like you have so many projects in your hands and so many pots right now. Indeed. We are really trying to provide resources that touch all aspects of the feed industry and our membership.
00:02:46
Speaker
And so that means working across a broader landscape that's not only our feed industry members, but a lot of the stakeholders, which in most cases are either on the upstream kind of supply side of us, or they're on the downstream customer side of us. And by that, I mean our.
00:03:03
Speaker
mostly our animal ag customers and so that just broadens the landscape where we engage and it broadens the number of stakeholders we communicate and work with and it's lended itself well to increasing the number of opportunities that we have available to us.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. More and more today, the feed industry is not a monolith. So we work together. We're part of the animals agriculture supply chain. So it's really important that we work with all the factors
Board of Trustees and Industry Insights
00:03:35
Speaker
of it. You had your board of trustees meeting, which you welcomed in some new trustees. You thanked some for working as they left. And I just got really fascinated by the whole process. How often do you have board of trustees meetings? What gets discussed there? And then also.
00:03:51
Speaker
What is a trustee? What do they do? How are they involved? And how do maybe someone's interested in becoming one? How do they start to get their foot in that door?
00:04:02
Speaker
So iFeeders Board of Trustees are a key component of the workings of iFeeder. And to be clear, our trustees are selected based on a set of requirements within our bylaws. But essentially, our board members represent a variety of aspects of the feed industry. So we have members that represent
00:04:32
Speaker
cooperatives, feed mills, ingredient manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, equipment providers, and even the aspect of our feed industry that is our customer. So we have representation currently from
00:04:46
Speaker
Dairy Management Inc. On our previous board we had also representatives from National Pork Board. So it's helpful to us to have this nice mix of feed industry members because our board generally, what they do is provide perspective and insights into iFeeders operations. Now they also have financial responsibilities as well, but basically
00:05:13
Speaker
We're using them as a sounding board and an opportunity for us to gather insights from the industry so that we can act to serve the industry. And so our board gets together.
00:05:28
Speaker
three times a year we generally meet at the same time as the AFIA board because of some of our members are in common by our bylaws we're required to have a certain fraction of our board members are also AFIA board members but beyond that we always seek to broaden our perspective and so that's why we bring on somebody like Dairy Management Inc. or we might bring in
00:05:52
Speaker
a sustainability expert from one of our member companies who maybe doesn't serve on the board, but who we'd like to have their insights. And so our board rotates. We usually have three folks come on and three folks go off each year. And that gives us the opportunity to always have the historical perspective of iFeeder,
00:06:13
Speaker
but also to have new folks coming in. And then just out of interest, AFIAs, because of our linkage to the American Feed Industry Association, AFIAs outgoing board chair is our incoming chair. So Carlos Gonzalez just got done serving for the AFI board of directors as the current chair. So he's now our I feeder chair. So that's how it works.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting way to do it too because associations, other trusts, like they just, the whole board almost cycles every single year or two years. It seems it's a really interesting, like you're constantly getting infused with those new ideas, but you're also have semblance of stability in it, which is really important because no organization can have a new directive every single year. And that's also why we have our strategic plan. That is the core of what we do, right? That helps carry us through that changing board members as well.
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah,
Sustainability and Educational Resources
00:07:12
Speaker
definitely. You're doing so much. The main thing that I always think about when I think I feed it right now though, is your sustainability roadmap, your just animal food industry toolkit. How is that going? How is that moving along since we talked to you last in January, I believe. And are there other educational initiatives too, that you're excited about? Yeah. So we are making progress on the current phase of our roadmap efforts. And in fact, we are going to be releasing in July.
00:07:40
Speaker
a couple of new resources that have stemmed from that. So one resource that we're very excited about that's coming out of that work is something that we work to develop in coordination or in collaboration with some students at Iowa State University. So Dr. Kurt Rosen traders
00:07:58
Speaker
engineering for sustainability course helped us define and identify the importance of several material issues for the feed industry. So in our previous work, we'd identified 16 issues that were relevant or material to the business of the American feed industry. And then in this project, we wanted to
00:08:21
Speaker
Better define what those issues are. Identify why feed industry member, animal food industry member, might be interested in reporting on or setting goals in that area or identifying that as something for their organization of importance in their sustainability program.
00:08:39
Speaker
And then we also, importantly, wanted to provide narratives or examples of feed members that were actually doing something within each of these different material issue areas. So the start of the project was that most folks, when I go out and talk about sustainability, they immediately think I'm talking about greenhouse gas emissions and they immediately think like the focus of sustainability efforts is on climate change.
00:09:05
Speaker
And so we wanted them to understand that it's much bigger than that and that in fact it's up to any of our industry members to define which issues are important to them and isn't necessarily greenhouse gas emissions. And so this resource is going to give them
00:09:25
Speaker
some insights into where they may start their materiality assessment, what issues they may want to utilize themselves, as well as help them understand what those issues are and what they may already be doing to support those that they just aren't talking about. So that's one resource we have coming up.
00:09:44
Speaker
that resource will be out sometime in July. You'll be able to find it on our website at IPeter.org or if you see the newsletter, there'll be information there. We also have two more resources that are coming out and being added to the toolkit and they're a little bit in combination. We've been working with the context network to better understand
00:10:05
Speaker
the data needs of our customers, the feed industry's customers, relative to some of those material issues. For example, relative to water use or feed safety or greenhouse gas emissions or energy.
00:10:21
Speaker
And so we've mapped out what many of the allied animal organizations from the Pet Food Institute to the US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef are looking to track and report towards their goals on those different areas. And so we've mapped that for members to see. We've also, through survey work with, again, those allied organizations, surveyed them about
00:10:50
Speaker
what their challenges are in the data space around feed and what their data needs are, which will provide insights and what our members can be providing or should be thinking about as they're looking to support our allied animal organizations in that space.
00:11:05
Speaker
And then the third one that part of that is the work that we've done to map what it would look like to use performance measures for animal production as a way to reduce the environmental impact.
00:11:22
Speaker
So as we pursue animal nutrition to help us improve average daily gain or improve feed conversion efficiency, what do those performance metrics, like what do those improvements do to reduce the footprint of animal ag through feed and nutrition?
00:11:40
Speaker
And so that is literature review, a data set, as well as what it would look like to map those and what additional information needs we have to be able to do that. So that resource is also coming out. So there's three things that are forthcoming. We anticipate all those to be available in July. And so that work continues to create resources to support the industry.
00:12:04
Speaker
I truly believe it's about teaching animal agriculture and especially our industry about just telling our story. So much of it has been, we've been silent for so long. I was actually discussing with some friends the other day about agriculture's impact on climate. And yeah, while everything's not perfect, I've also never seen an industry. So, so many people trying, we're always trying new things. We're always trying to make things better and to be able to share that with people, I think is really, really important.
00:12:30
Speaker
so that they know that they're not committing some grave sin by beef at the grocery store every week. Well, communication is a big element of it and feed doesn't always do enough to tell our part of the story. And part of that's just because we don't quite know how to do that or we don't know what we should be conveying to do that. Or maybe we just aren't supporting our
00:12:56
Speaker
customers, our animal ag folks, and up in that space, and there's more we can do there. And so that's putting resources together that can better enable our members to do that is one of the things that we're trying to do.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, and you're doing a very good job of it as well. I completely get it too. I get what people are coming from. I also just want to, you know, sit back and do my job and not have to advocate for myself all the time.
Data Updates Post-COVID
00:13:20
Speaker
But it's something you got to do in this modern world of ours. One of the projects I saw included during your last board meeting was you're updating data sets for the US feed and pet food ingredient consumption. Can you talk a little bit more about those and how useful and what they mean to the industry?
00:13:36
Speaker
Well, this gets a little bit to being able to communicate better, especially to be able to communicate the scope and value of the animal feed and pet food industry in prior to my coming to.
00:13:49
Speaker
In 2018-2019, iFeeder partnered with the Pet Food Institute and the North American Renders Association to develop the first pet food report. There was a comprehensive kind of analysis of
00:14:08
Speaker
all of the different ingredients that go into pet food and not only what the scope of those ingredients are and quantifying how much of them are used and where they're used from a geographic standpoint, but also where they're coming from and the value of those ingredients throughout the supply chain. So the value that they bring to our rural and urban communities. So really just a data set that allows us to understand
00:14:38
Speaker
the extensive scope of ingredients in the pet food space and the value that they bring, that the industry brings, right, in supporting the populations, pets, dogs and cats, primarily. And, you know, that data set, I have been contacted
00:14:54
Speaker
countless numbers of times by university students, by federal agencies, by industry members themselves, looking for that data or more details about that data. We've had just most recently Penn State University students
00:15:11
Speaker
Seeking that data that they were going to use as part of their assessment for the amount of Pennsylvania grown crops that were going into pet food and so we never quite know where the Request for the data are going to come from but the data set is is used often I would say so we're going to be number one updating that report so we feel like that's a report that we should update on a semi continual basis and
00:15:35
Speaker
The other report is the ingredient consumption report, and that's much larger than pet food. So that's looking at, I would say, domestic animals. We basically are looking at 10 different species, including equine and aquaculture. And we look at collective of 47 different ingredients were included in the last report. So again, this very diverse use of ingredients in the feed space. The first report was done in 2017.
00:16:04
Speaker
It was updated with 2020 data and released in 2021. So again, it's timely to be able to update and release that report again. Basically for both of these reports, we know that animal production itself changes, right? The number of animals that are being produced or number of animals that are out there. The nutrition for them is always evolving. Pet consumer purchasing decisions, just the number of additional pets, you know, think about the last pet food report came out.
00:16:34
Speaker
prior to COVID, we know that one of the trends was people purchasing pets during COVID. And so we expect to see changes right in those pet food consumption numbers. And then we also have the availability of ingredients forever changing. And so all of those things lead us to realize that we need to update both of those reports. So that effort is getting underway. Actually, we just all agreed on the contract yesterday.
00:17:01
Speaker
The ingredient consumption report is supported by the North American Renderers Association and American Feed Industry Association, or those are planned partners. We are, of course, looking for other collaborators or investors in those projects because we are not a member-based organization. We do have to raise funds for these projects. And so we are in the process of fundraising for both of those.
00:17:25
Speaker
If there are folks that are interested in the outcomes of those reports or would like to be part of the advisory committee or get a sneak peek into the data before it's available, we have an investor group that we will do that with. And so it would be great if folks were interested in supporting us on those efforts. It's our industry. People need to get involved to communicate. Wow. Before COVID, right? A completely different world.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, especially in the pet space. And so this time, one of the things that our board back in May agreed to sort of port these projects and you're like, well, why isn't this project underway yet? And so fascinatingly, we were looking for the pet food project. We actually buy data from Nielsen's so that we understand the point of sale.
00:18:09
Speaker
data. We can't obviously do that for the broader animal ingredient report because there's not Nielsen's data for what comes from a feed mill. But for pets, we can buy actual data of purchasing decisions. And so previously, we've just used point of sale or brick and mortar store data. But now this year, we had to look at also obtaining some online data. I myself buy
00:18:29
Speaker
My cat food online and so many other folks are doing that now as well And so we felt like we needed to re-look at how we were going to be pulling the data So anyways, those are things that are changing that we need to be aware of and it's just again another reason why we need to update the reports
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, I just kind of assume my delivery person hates me at this point when I get cat litter delivered and cat food delivered.
Improving Communication and Branding
00:18:53
Speaker
Well, we've been speaking about it this whole time, but really the message I'm seeing is like communication, right? It's so important. I've noticed that iFeeter has really upped its own communication game. Can you tell us a little bit more about your blog and your newsletter that's coming out once a month? That it's always been really amazing. I love your little updates there at the top.
00:19:13
Speaker
We are continuing to put our newsletter out on a monthly basis. We're in the process of updating that. So it's going to have a fresh look the next time you see it. Hopefully a little easier to find and see some content. We recently added the blog. So when we updated our website, when we refreshed our webpage, one of the elements we wanted to add was a blog.
00:19:33
Speaker
just so we could have another way of providing more content, right? Content is king these days as we're thinking about how we're using it on social media. So things like this podcast that I'm doing with you or the blog or the newsletter, all of those things give us content that we can use on our LinkedIn page, which is a growing source for us. But really the push behind iFeeders communication strategy
00:19:57
Speaker
is getting our name, getting our brand out there. So we have, you know, when we surveyed industry members two years ago, I guess now, what we realized that there were many industry members that really didn't know the difference between AFIA and iFeeder. And that's a challenge for us, especially from a fundraising standpoint. And we also realized that folks that knew iFeeder couldn't necessarily say what our mission was, except for that it was for education and research. And so
00:20:26
Speaker
We have been working diligently to get ifeeders brand out there and get some name recognition, as well as being able to better communicate all of the good work that we are doing. And so we work really closely with the AFIAs communications team. And I think the work that we've done in the last three years is really starting to show you're noticing it. Other folks are noticing it.
00:20:52
Speaker
And it's a really valuable piece of the work that iFeeder does. And it's really important because why do all this great work for the industry if nobody knows about it? Yeah, exactly. And we will have links to the newsletter page and the iFeeder website.
Accessing iFeeder Resources
00:21:10
Speaker
But for anyone who's only listening, do you want to tell people where they can find out more information about iFeeder?
00:21:16
Speaker
Yes, super easy. You can go to ifeater.org. You can on that site sign up for the newsletter if you would like to receive it on a monthly basis. You can check out the blog. You can learn about the variety of research and education projects we have underway. That links to all the resources that we develop are available there. So I would encourage folks to go visit ifeater.org.
00:21:42
Speaker
And I would encourage folks to sign up for the newsletter because it really is quite good. I've been enjoying getting it in my inbox every month. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Laura. I really appreciate having you on. Steve, thanks again for inviting Ifeeder back to your podcast. We'll have to have you on pretty soon because until then, thank you for coming. Everyone out there listening. Thank you so much for doing that. And until next time, stay safe.