Abstract
Improved efficiency in dairy systems is a significant challenge for the future, to meet increased food demand while competing for inputs, adapting to climate change, and delivering ecosystem services. Future grazing systems can play a major role to supply healthier foods within systems with a reduced reliance on fossil fuels and chemical inputs, while also delivering environmental, biodiversity, and animal welfare benefits. Can we design lower-input systems that deliver efficient levels of output in a positive environmental context? Lower-input systems will have a lower reliance on concentrates and inorganic fertilizers, and an increased reliance on extended grazing seasons and high quality forage. Multiple strategies will be needed to maximize nitrogen use efficiency, including a strong reliance on legume-based swards that displace inorganic nitrogen fertilizer. Expected environmental benefits include a reduction in GHG emissions and nitrate leaching, an increase in C sequestration and a reduced reliance on the use of herbicides and pesticides. In comparison with confinement feeding systems, the relatively low energy density and high climate sensitivity of grazing diets requires both effective pasture management and robust and adaptive animals. The appropriate cow for grazing systems must be able to harvest pasture efficiently by re-calving every 365 days to efficiently utilize peak pasture supply, achieve large intakes of forage relative to their genetic potential for milk production (i.e., aggressive grazers) and be adaptable to fluctuations in feed supply. Legume-based multi-species grassland mixtures can maximize the use of symbiotically-fixed nitrogen, and displace the use of inorganic N fertilizer. There is a need for system-scale experiments that use legume-based mixtures within paddocks, and in grassland leys within crop rotations. Moreover, lower-input systems will need a combined focus on research and knowledge transfer for rapid testing and implementation. New opportunities and requirements will arise as policy, society, and the markets demand a higher level of environmental sustainability from food systems and products. This raises the possibility of public-private partnerships for the demand and reward of provision of environmental benefits. To deliver these benefits, future food systems will need to be redesigned to incorporate the enhanced supply of a range of ecosystem goods and services, which should be better incentivized through the market price returned to producers.
Highlights
CHANGING DEMANDS ON FOOD SYSTEMS AND CLIMATE SMART FARMINGAcross the world, agriculture plays a crucial role in supplying food, but in shaping rural areas, preserving landscapes and cultural practices and heritage
Looking at a gradient of farming intensity from extensive to intermediate to intensive, the Farm Ecos project in Ireland showed that the area of semi-natural habitat was 42% to 15.6% to 6.1%, respectively (Rotchés-Ribalta et al, 2020). These studies demonstrate how intensive agricultural management such as occurs on most dairy systems is generally associated with a reduced area of habitat available for wild populations of plants and animals, and especially when there is low protection afforded to habitats by policy (Rotchés-Ribalta et al, 2020)
The growing market awareness and reliance of food brands on sustainability standards represents an effort to internalize the environmental benefits of farming systems i.e., brands want to be associated with practices that are good for soil, water, climate and biodiversity
Summary
While the intensification and regional specialization of the Green Revolution in Agriculture during the last 60 years has greatly increased productivity, it has resulted in adverse consequences for the natural environment. The increased use of concentrates, and in particular imported soya bean and palm kernel, creates increased demand for such crops in developing economies thereby stimulating deforestation and environmentally harmful agricultural practices elsewhere around the world Allied to these damaging impacts of intensification, the loss of landscape biodiversity arising from such farming practices, combined with the disappearance of habitats for small land animals, insects or birds is important in the context of the contribution of livestock farming to GHG emissions and global warming. Such advanced market systems already occur in some countries such as Switzerland, France and Germany (see below)
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