Abstract
Animal production systems (APSs) have long been transformed through intensification, specialization and geographical concentration, leading them to become major anthropogenic drivers of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Agroecology, organic farming and sustainable intensification have been proposed as alternative models to invert those trends. Diversity is highly valued in agroecology and organic farming, in which it is assumed not only to increase farm performance but also to strengthen farm resilience. Here, we examine how the diversity of system components and interactions among these components can increase productivity, resource-use efficiency and farm resilience in aquaculture, rabbit, monogastric and ruminant systems. In doing so, we reveal that the same processes can occur in very different systems. For instance, the higher performance of multi-species aquaculture or ruminant grazing systems results from (i) the complementary feeding habits of animal species that exploit resources from different ecological niches more efficiently; and (ii) facilitation or competitive exclusion, which results in a species increasing or decreasing resource availability for another species. The benefits of diversity are observed not only in relatively extensive systems but also in intensive indoor systems. For instance, genetic diversity is associated with herd and social immunity in rabbit production, while trade-offs between life functions play a major role in dairy herd performance. In the last section, we discuss how management options nested in system component diversity and their interactions can enhance system resilience. Strategic and tactical management of APS diversity can promote farm buffering and adaptive capabilities, respectively, via the abovementioned processes. By stabilizing the farm financial situation and facilitating access to short supply channels, transformative changes, such as a diversification of the animal species bred or development of a processing enterprise on farm, expand options for increasing the resilience of APSs to market price fluctuations and climatic shocks. However, the need for new technical skills and sometimes high initial investments can act as strong inhibitors of farm diversification. We conclude with a description of some of the research or action that is needed for these principles to be more widely implemented in commercial farms.
Highlights
The livestock sector has received particular attention in the news and scientific media and is considered a major anthropogenic driver of climate change, water pollution, and biodiversity losses
The best transition options are still strongly debated, there is a consensus on the need for animal production systems (APSs) to reduce the use of inputs, to emit less greenhouse gasses (GHG) and to increase their mitigation potential, e.g., through carbon sequestration in grassland and crop soils (Food Agriculture and Organisation, 2013)
We focus on interactions between system components and analyze how appropriate combinations of plant and animal production and of livestock species can increase farm production and benefit animal health
Summary
The livestock sector has received particular attention in the news and scientific media and is considered a major anthropogenic driver of climate change, water pollution, and biodiversity losses. There has been an important research effort to determine how multispecies grasslands could benefit sward productivity, animal performance, and farm fodder autonomy and resilience in grassland-based systems. The diversity of trade-offs and adaptive response of animals is assumed to buffer the effect of random environmental perturbations in the long term.
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