Food efficiency of livestock in organic farming and competition with human nutrition

Abstract

Livestock are always intended to provide animal protein for human consumption. In the context of worldpopulation growth and a decrease in the agricultural area (SDES, 2015), livestock farming is implicatedin its consumption of agricultural land and cereals that could be directly used for human consumption.This study, based on a sample of farms in organic farming, aimed at i) characterizing the differentfeeding systems, ii) identifying and quantifying the different types of animal feed in competition withhuman food, and iii) measuring feed use efficiency as proposed by Laisse et al. (2017) and Mottet et al.(2017). The efficiency of areas used for human consumption is based on a fixed assumption that onlypermanent grassland is non-competitive, the other areas being likely to be edible for human. Theanalysis of feed rations and production of 743 organic dairy farms and 411 organic beef farms led to the estimate of an average 95m² required to produce one kilogram of animal protein in the dairy system and508m² in the beef system. Beef farms are less efficient and use 2.73 kg of vegetable protein incompetition with human nutrition to produce 1 kilogram of animal protein, while dairy farms use anaverage of only 1.61 kg. The most efficient farms in terms of converting plant protein are using moregrass and pastures in the livestock ration. The use of grassland in the systems often requires a largerarea than in farms using concentrates. The analysis carried out did not take into account the ecosystemservices of the grassland (biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water quality, quality of products).