Drought Impacts, Coping Responses and Adaptation in the UK Outdoor Livestock Sector: Insights to Increase Drought Resilience

Gloria Salmoral,Benjamin Ababio,Ian Holman

doi:10.3390/land9060202

Abstract

Drought has detrimental impacts on crop and livestock farming systems worldwide, but less attention has been given to outdoor livestock systems, particularly in humid temperate regions. This research evaluated how an intense drought in 2018 impacted the UK livestock sector and the responses adopted by key actors, though a combination of analysis of weekly agricultural trade publications and semi-structured interviews with livestock farmers. Drought impacts centred on feed and fodder availability, animal productivity and welfare, farm economics, and farmer well-being, with strong inter-dependencies observed. Most drought responses by farmers were reactive short-term coping strategies to address feed shortages, with three main strategies applied: management of available grazing and feed; selling livestock to reduce feed demand and to obtain income; and buying-in additional feed. Few longer-term adaptive measures were identified due to a range of constraints. Moving forwards, the UK livestock sector needs to convert the learning from the reactive measures implemented in 2018 into pro-active drought planning approaches. The current political changes in the UK also provides a unique opportunity for agricultural policy to better reward the desirable nationally- and locally-important non-market services or public goods that livestock farming provides. Together, these should support increased drought resilience in livestock farming and increased farming viability.

Highlights

Agriculture is widely acknowledged as the economic sector that is most vulnerable to drought [1]with 80% of the economic losses due to drought in developing countries affecting the agriculture sector [2]
The impacts of a drought event depend on many factors including the type of drought, the characteristics of the drought; the type of farming system exposed to drought, its drought sensitivity; and the adaptive capacity of the food supply chains
This paper aims to evaluate how the outdoor livestock sector in the UK was impacted by the 2018 drought, and whether the responses implemented by the different multi-level actors in the UK livestock sector show evidence for longer-term adaptation to droughts

Summary

Introduction

Agriculture is widely acknowledged as the economic sector that is most vulnerable to drought [1]with 80% of the economic losses due to drought in developing countries affecting the agriculture sector [2]. There are much fewer studies on livestock systems, even though research has shown the impacts of high temperatures and drought on field-scale grass yield and quality [8]; and productivity (both quality and quantity of meat, milk, wool, etc.) and fertility in livestock, cows [9,10]. This is despite drought threatening the production of livestock on the 35 M km of grass-shrub rangelands

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Conclusion