Abstract
Livestock has been a backbone of people's livelihood as long as agriculture has existed in Scandinavia, c. 6,000 years. In the early Iron Age, c. 2,000 years ago, a land management system began to form, composed of infields (enclosed hay-meadows and crop fields) and outlying land used for livestock grazing. Despite many later innovations and societal changes affecting agricultural technology and practices, this way of organizing land use was a template for how landscapes were managed and structured until the modernization of agriculture and forestry during the last centuries. There are legacies of this historic land-use, mainly as “semi-natural grasslands” managed by livestock grazing (open or semi-open; long continuity of management; not much influenced by commercial fertilizers, plowing etc.). These semi-natural grasslands harbor an exceptional small-scale biodiversity, particularly plants and insects. Landscapes with semi-natural grasslands represent cultural heritage, and are appreciated for their beauty. The total area of semi-natural grasslands has declined considerably during the past 100 years, and the current trend suggest that further declines are expected. A large fraction of threatened biodiversity in Sweden thrives in these grasslands. Livestock grazing in semi-natural grasslands makes an important contribution to food production, and there is an increasing interest in consumption of products, mainly meat, from these grasslands. This implies that there is a positive feedback between food production, maintenance of biological diversity, and cultural heritage. This paper gives an overview of semi-natural grasslands, focusing on Sweden, from a historic, cultural and ecological perspective, and aims at discussing challenges and prospects for developing and maintaining positive associations between producing food, biodiversity, and cultural heritage, in the future.
Highlights
Agricultural systems based on livestock are ubiquitous globally
The major conclusion from this overview is that livestock grazing in Swedish semi-natural grasslands maintains coproduction of food, biological diversity and cultural heritage
Semi-natural grasslands have a long history of management and maintain a rich diversity of species
Summary
Agricultural systems based on livestock are ubiquitous globally. It has been estimated that around 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product derives from livestock, and around a third of the world’s terrestrial ice-free surface is to some extent used for livestock (Herrero et al, 2013). The management of land and livestock has changed fundamentally since that time, there are many traces in today’s agricultural landscapes that has a deep history, motivating terms such as historical, or traditional, agricultural management This holds for Scandinavia (e.g., Eriksson, 2018), as well as for all over Europe (e.g., Blondel, 2006; Emanuelsson, 2009; Lennartsson et al, 2016; Dobrovodská et al, 2019), and other parts of the world, for example Asia (e.g., Yi et al, 2008; Berglund et al, 2014), and Africa (e.g., Boles and Lane, 2016; Van der Plas et al, 2019). An overarching question is whether there is a future for landscapes harboring the still existing biologically highly diverse, culturally highly valued, and (for many people) beautiful seminatural grasslands
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