Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

NANP Coordinating Committee (CC), Feed Composition Committee (FCC) and Modeling Committee (MC) conducted regular meetings throughout the year to plan activities that contribute to NRSP9 goals. Committee chairs and subcommittees met as needed throughout the year and reported to their respective committee chairs. An in-person meeting of the CC was also held in conjunction with the Summit. Discussions in the 2022-23 year focused on execution of the NANP Summit and subsequent dissemination of takeaways, continued improvements to databases and alignment with National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) nutrient utilization report updates, expanded social media, and alternative funding models.  Minutes for all CC meetings are included in the attachment.

Coordinating Committee:

Progress toward business plan: The CC chair completed the application for nonprofit status submitted in conjunction with FASS, allowing NANP the ability to accept funding through the organization rather than through one of the member institutions. This is a critical step in the future NANP business plan.

Facilitating downloads or databases in response to user needs: A MOU is being developed to allow NANP to impose conditions and standards on database sharing. This Memorandum of Agreement ("Agreement") is entered into on the day of data download (Effective Data) by and between the National Animal Nutrition Program (NANP) and the Data User. The NANP agrees to share specific data with the Data User for the purpose of research and teaching. The Data User agrees to the following terms and conditions: source citation, non-commercial use, commercial use, non-shareable, no alterations, reporting errors, and duration and termination.

Partnering with NRCS:  An agreement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the NANP, through Texas A&M AgriLife Research as the lead recipient, was developed to increase: (1) awareness of livestock feed management, (2) utilization and implementation of climate-smart feed management, and (3) application of current science and technical knowledge to demonstrate the impact of livestock feeding management. This agreement aims to create a Climate-Smart Feed Management (CSFM) committee to work closely with the NRCS, current NANP committees, relevant organizations, animal and feed industries, and academia to improve livestock feeding management by engaging stakeholders, identifying priorities, providing training, and disseminating information. This agreement will provide up to $1.5 million to support the effort.

NANP Summit 2023 - Producing Healthy Diets from Sustainable Animal Systems: The 2023 NANP Summit took place at the National Academy of Science Building, in Washington DC on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. The stakeholders that were invited included: Animal commodity groups, Agriculture Committee staffers, USDA leadership, members of CFAR, AFIA, Agricultural Experiment Station leaders, NAS, FFAR, and Governors Council. The mission of the Summit was to evaluate the use of animals to sustainably provide for healthy human diets. Speakers from across the county and Canada presented on livestock sustainability, challenges of world food security, alternate protein sources, impact of livestock on the environment and climate change, use of life cycles assessment and role of animals in future food systems. At this Summit we also hosted a Graduate Student Poster Competition. There were 16 abstracts submitted, from which 6 students were selected to receive a scholarship to attend the Summit and present their work in the form of a poster.  Post-Summit publications are in the process of being produced and will be widely circulated when finished.

Some highlights from the presentations and discussions included:

• Mitigating the climate impacts of livestock production and improving circularity may also provide new economic opportunities for livestock producers via carbon and ecosystems services markets.
• The amount and type of animal-sourced food that is healthy and sustainable will depend on the local context and health priorities and will change over time.
• Policies, programs, and incentives are needed to ensure best practices in production, curb consumption where high, and sustainably increase consumption where low.
• By continuously improving production efficiency and management practices, animal agriculture can be a short-term solution to fight climate warming that the global community can leverage while developing long-term solutions for reducing fossil fuel carbon emissions.
• Progress is being made in all sectors of the food animal industry to help control and reduce impacts on the environment in areas including greenhouse gas emissions (methane, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia), fossil fuel use, water consumption, and excess nutrient excretion.
• Animal nutritionists have a crucial role to play through incorporating sustainability criteria into the formulation of animal diets and production systems.
• The feeds that animals consume have an influence on both feed and animal production, and sustainability is a relevant and important domain for the field of animal nutrition.

 Summit recordings: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLluKn_9UrhIRYw4qvrF1ivE1Jv7qB-ML0

Feed Composition Committee:

As part of the continued effort to improve the feed composition database, the FCC completed  curation of more than 3 million ingredient composition records from the most recent beef and dairy NASEM reports, which required extensive sourcing and manipulation of the original files to generate the dataset needed for the NANP feed composition database.

The feed composition database user workflow for selecting ingredients was revamped to make it more intuitive and easier to use; this ongoing effort seeks to improve the educational value and utility for broadening the incorporation of this NANP resource in academic curricula.

The FCC created new database structures to permit the importation of a wider variety of feed composition datasets and enable the incorporation of the new user workflow for selecting ingredients.

The FCC proposed, and had accepted, a symposium to be held at the 2024 ASAS-CSAS-WSASAS Annual Meeting involving analytical errors and anomalies in analyzed nutrient composition of feedstuffs.

The chair of the FCC engaged with multiple industry partners who are interested in providing large datasets for incorporation into the consolidated NANP feed composition database. The database structure and interface work will help support this engagement with industry.

Modeling Committee:

The MC hired a part-time post-doctoral associate to help update/revise the existing modeling databases available through NANP. Updates have been completed for 5 of the 10 databases available. This included a detailed examination and error correction of the updated original data and the R code used to convert this data into the NANP database style. Furthermore, new variables were added, and some variables were modified or removed during this process, leading to an update of the Abbreviation List table.

The MC created a Diet Formulation/Optimization Platform Subcommittee to investigate alternatives to the use of HTML or Excel platforms for future NASEM diet formulation/evaluation models. The objectives of this subcommittee are to: (1) collect information on possible optimization platforms that could be used in diet formulation or evaluation programs for future NASEM Nutrient Requirement series models; and (2) test optimization platforms to compare their functionality for solution time, solution consistency, solution resolution, and stability. Nineteen potential optimization algorithms have been collected and will be tested by the subcommittee.

A one day Modeling Workshop was held at the ADSA meeting on June 25 in Ottawa, Canada. It was attended by ~40 participants. Most participants stayed for the whole day. There were three invited speakers, each presenting a short theory seminar and a hands-on demonstration. All three speakers were invited to provide reviews to the Journal of Dairy Science on their seminar subjects, and two of those reviews are nearly submitted. The Modeling Committee will continue to work with JDS (if they remain interested) to publish the workshops into invited review papers. The evaluation approach for future workshops will be reexamined due to a poor response rate from the follow up survey.

The ASAS-NANP Pre-Conference on “Mathematical Modeling in Animal Nutrition: Training the Future Generation in Data and Predictive Analytics for a Sustainable Development” was held on July 16 in Albuquerque, NM and had approximately 70 participants, of which 30 (about 43%) responded to the survey. Six invited speakers from different modeling expertise delivered three 40-minute presentations and three 1.5-hour hands-on presentations. There was a statistical difference between before and after the pre-conference for all questions related to understanding fundamental and predictive modeling techniques. From 1 (minimal) to 5 (expert) scoring system, the average for six questions was 2.75 (before) and 3.56 (after). The participants were “extremely satisfied” with the morning and afternoon presentations and indicated the material learned was “very to extremely effective” on their work or research. The average overall satisfaction for the pre-conference was 4.53 (scale 1 = low to 5 = high). The seventh ASAS-NANP Pre-Conference will occur in 2024 in Calgary, Canada, and will help prepare training for the next generation in modeling.

Four peer-reviewed publications have been submitted and accepted by the Journal of Animal Science from the 2022 ASAS-NANP Symposium.

• Brennan, Menendez, Ehlert, Tedeschi. ASAS-NANP symposium: mathematical modeling in animal nutrition: Making sense of big data and machine learning: How open-source code can advance training of animal scientists.
• Kaniyamattam and Tedeschi. ASAS-NANP symposium: mathematical modeling in animal nutrition: Agent-based modeling for livestock systems: the mechanics of development and application.
• Munoz-Tamayo and Tedeschi. ASAS-NANP symposium: mathematical modeling in animal nutrition: the power of identifiability analysis for dynamic modeling in animal science - a practitioner approach.
• Tedeschi, Menendez III, and Remus. ASAS-NANP symposium: mathematical modeling in animal nutrition: training the future generation in data and predictive analytics for sustainable development. A summary of the 2021 and 2022 symposia.