As the feed industry consolidated and the people in it honed their professional skills, the rising influence of special-interest groups raised new challenges.
The American Feed Industry Association’s involvement in the international feed industry marked significant milestones. In October 1992, more than 200 companies exhibited and nearly 3,000 visitors attended the first AFIA exhibition outside the United States, in Guadalajara, Mexico. AFIA organized a summit with animal feed industry leaders from Canada, Europe and Mexico in early 1993. In 1998, AFIA’s fourth show in Mexico brought more than 7,000 people to see nearly 270 exhibitors, and later that year AFIA staged an international feed industry show in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
At home, emerging issues demanded attention. “The biggest public perception issue to hit animal agriculture in decades is ... the treatment and secondary use of animal waste from livestock and poultry farms,” said AFIA in its 1997-98 annual report. AFIA worked with producer groups to support a science-based approach to the issue, and the Nutrition Council through its Econutrition Committee produced a report on ways feed manufacturers could reduce the amount of ambient phosphorus and nitrogen in livestock and poultry waste used as fertilizer. AFIA successfully worked to see that the federal agricultural research budget provided funding to help the industry discover scientific information on nutrient management and waste handling.
Perhaps no single market development signaled major change in the traditional feed industry as clearly as the 1998 plunge in hog prices. Annual average hog prices had been the highest in history during 1996 and 1997, but prices fell so sharply that the 1998 annual average hit the lowest level in 26 years. Several of the structural changes cited as reasons for the crash had been painfully evident to Midwestern commercial feed manufacturers: rapid growth of mega-producers, reduced slaughtering capacity, investments of capital from outside the traditional hog industry, increased contract production and global market conditions, including economic struggles in Asia.
Integration of the poultry industry several decades earlier had slowly moved poultry producers out of commercial feed markets. Much of the beef feeding business also moved away from Corn Belt farmer-feeders to Great Plains commercial feedlots, so hog feed demand became critical to many feed manufacturers in the Corn Belt by the early 1990s. But that demand also changed with the pork industry’s increasing use of contract hog production and investment from outside the traditional hog industry.
As members’ needs expanded, AFIA stayed on track with its historic focus on feed issues: feed research funding, model feed labeling rules, Good Manufacturing Practices regulations, state feed laws, nutrient requirements for swine, the Feed Manufacturing Short Course at Kansas State University, regional production schools and more. Its activities also reflected a broadening focus: fast-track authority for U.S. trade agreements, nutrient management programs for animal agriculture, national food regulation, food disparagement legislation, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Environmental Protection Agency issues and responses to national media inquiries tied to food issues and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
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