Europe Already Did It, We Should Too!

I'm sitting on the patio this morning watching the fog burn off the fields around our backyard landscaping. We are framed in with two treelines and I've looked at them a thousand times, and most mornings I see them just fine. But in the fog, I only see what's closest. The rest disappears. Not gone, just hidden. And I don't even notice what I'm missing until the fog lifts.

I attended a swine nutrition conference yesterday. The topic of one presentation was eliminating a feed ingredient we use in young pig diets. An ingredient that is not an antibiotic, one we lean on specifically because it gives us a tool that isn't an antibiotic. Europe and China have already regulated it, and the presentation made the case that we should follow. Incidentally, this ingredient was the topic of my Masters Thesis.

I sat there and found myself rebutting every argument in my head. Not because I'm stubborn. Because the conclusion had arrived before the evidence did.

They started with a manure toxicity argument. This ingredient is used in nursery rations for a few weeks. That's a small slice of the total manure a farm produces. You could manage application rates the same way we already manage nitrogen and phosphorus. But more importantly, when someone ran an honest life cycle assessment across eight environmental categories, the difference between low and high inclusion was barely visible. For a 280-pound market pig, the environmental footprint of this ingredient is a rounding error.

Then came the antimicrobial resistance argument. And this is where things got interesting. The presenter used real science. Co-selection, gene mobilization, efflux pumps. All legitimate mechanisms worth studying. But then their own cited research said the quiet part. Twice. There is no definitive proof that reducing this ingredient lowers AMR prevalence. In the proceedings the data showed that pigs on the low inclusion program caught up to the high inclusion pigs in resistance gene detection by the end of the study. The treatment effect wasn't even statistically significant.

They presented evidence that contradicted their conclusion and kept driving toward it anyway.

The biggest piece they left off the ledger is the one that should keep you up at night. We use this ingredient because it is not an antibiotic. We've looked for replacements and nothing completely fills the gap. If you eliminate the non-antibiotic alternative, what's left? Antibiotics. The very thing the broader public health community is fighting to reduce. The presentation wrapped itself in "animal health is human health" language, borrowed the sustainability vocabulary, assigned a social cost to the ingredient, and never once assigned a social cost to the increased antibiotic use that follows its removal.

That's not holistic. That's selective. And selective analysis dressed up in holistic language is the most dangerous kind, because it makes you think you're seeing everything.

This isn't really about one ingredient in pig feed. This is about how we make decisions when we've already picked our answer. It happens in board rooms and school boards, township meetings and kitchen tables. Someone walks in with a conclusion and builds backward. The data that fits gets highlighted. The data that doesn't gets acknowledged just enough to look thorough, then set aside. The consequences of the proposal itself never make it onto the spreadsheet.

That's the blinder. Not ignorance. Agenda. And agenda isn't always bad intentions. Sometimes it's good people who care deeply about a problem and have narrowed their vision so much that they can't see the new problem forming right beside the one they're trying to solve.

The fog burned off an hour ago. I can see the whole tree line now. Funny how much you miss when you only look at what's closest.