Who consumes what, at the scale of French agriculture as a whole? This study, carried out within the GIS Avenir Élevages between 2018 and 2022, traces the path of grains, co-products and forages from French agricultural production to the various categories of farm animals. It covers the reference year 2015 and 17 crop supply chains, including the co-products of each processing stage, with feed consumption broken down by animal category (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry, horses, rabbits…).
The application offers 19 selectable views: an overall view of raw materials, the cereals (oats, durum wheat, soft wheat, maize, barley, rye, sorghum, triticale), the oil and protein crops (rapeseed, faba bean, flax, lupin, pea, soybean, sunflower), forages (including alfalfa) and sugar beet. Each diagram follows the material from production and imports through to its uses: animal feed (industrial compound feed or on-farm feed production), human food, exports and other uses. The underlying data workbooks can be downloaded.
The study applies the AF Filières method: defining the structure of the supply chains, collecting data from multiple sources (Agreste, FranceAgriMer, inter-branch organisations, technical institutes, customs data, expert judgement…), reconciling the data through constrained optimisation — redundant data are made consistent and missing data estimated, with confidence intervals — and finally representing the results as Sankey diagrams. Both the input data and the results were discussed with experts of the raw materials and animal feed markets.
The study was led by the GIS Avenir Élevages, commissioned by INRAE, CNIEL, FranceAgriMer, Terres Univia and APCA, with numerous partners including IFIP, IDELE, ITAVI, Arvalis, Céréopa and Inria (STEEP team), which developed the reconciliation method.
