Circular bioeconomy can improve ruminant sustainability, but needs systemic change. Precision feeding and the use of food waste can lower methane and waste impacts. Feed additives and gene editing provide potential tools to lower enteric methane. Life cycle assessment and modeling quantify trade-offs and co-benefits. Policies and finance should enable adoption, especially in low-income regions.
Ruminant livestock provide essential nutrient-dense foods, support hundreds of millions of rural households, and contribute to national economies. However, they are also sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use change. Reconciling these competing pressures requires rethinking livestock production through the lens of a circular bioeconomy.
This review explores opportunities to embed circularity principles into ruminant systems by recycling nutrients, valorizing agricultural byproducts, and better integrating crop–livestock systems.
We evaluate recent advances in precision nutrition and anti-methanogenic feed additives as well as emerging biotechnologies such as CRISPR-based microbial and plant editing. These interventions show promise in reducing enteric methane emissions and improving feed efficiency, with variable scalability across intensive and extensive systems.
Life cycle assessment and mechanistic modeling provide quantitative tools for capturing their environmental impacts, but methodological challenges remain, particularly regarding allocation of emissions, incorporation of soil carbon sequestration, and accounting for food–feed competition.
The review also considers co-benefits and trade-offs, including productivity gains, food security improvements, and risks of rebound effects such as herd expansion.
Advances in manure management, nutrient recovery, and digital monitoring, reporting, and verification frameworks further expand the potential of circular livestock systems.
However, achieving large-scale change will require enabling policy frameworks, financial innovations, and inclusive approaches that address the needs of women, youth, and smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries where over 80% of livestock-related emissions originate.
By aligning nutrition, management, biotechnology, and systems modelling within a circular bioeconomy, ruminant production can shift from being a leading contributor to environmental degradation toward becoming a cornerstone of climate mitigation, resource efficiency, and resilient food systems.
Source: Animal Journal