Swine production: how sustainable is sustainability?

One major challenge when discussing sustainability is deciding where the box needs to be drawn with regards to what pieces need to be included to look at the whole of sustainability. For example, it would be easy to draw the box around a pig and only look at the direct outputs of the pig, but production of that pig requires crops to be grown, harvested, and processed to make feed, for the pig. The feedmill, that manufactures the feed uses energy to run grinding and mixing equipment. The feedmill had to be constructed, which used energy and raw building materials. The concrete floor of the feedmill had to be trucked in. The cement trucks had to be manufactured, and the truck manufacturing plant uses energy. So the box can get to be very large. The larger the box gets, the more complex the sustainability question becomes. Ultimately, we need to sustain the planet and swine production has to be part of that process (Figure 3). Therefore, while it is important to strive towards sustainability in swine production, ultimately swine production is only one piece of agriculture and agriculture is one piece of the planetary sustainability puzzle. It will take a coordinated effort across all facets of society to truly move the sustainability needle. Individual pieces like environmental sustainability of swine production should continue to be advance, but it is important to understand the impacts of progress in one area on the whole of sustainability. So, is sustainability sustainable? Well, we all hope so, but there are a finite number of natural resources available and with a still growing human population, it will be increasingly more challenging, and let's face it, we have not done the best job so far! We need to shift away from placing blame on others or drawing the box to bias sustainability efforts or to effectively blame one area over another and focus more on fitting all the pieces together for a sustainable planet. Conflict of interest statement. None declared.