Abstract
Abstract While there is increasing evidence of the sustainability benefits of diversified systems in the organic cropping sector, this has been much less investigated with organic livestock farming. To fill this knowledge gap, we surveyed a sample of 128 European organic multi-species livestock farms located across seven countries – Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland – and covering a large range of livestock species combinations. We recorded 1574 variables as raw data out of which we calculated 107 indicators describing farm structure, management and several sustainability dimensions: resource use efficiency and conservation, animal, land and work productivities, animal and human welfare. After technical validation of the data, we withdrew 26 farms and the database covers 102 farms. This database is well suited to unveil relationships between various dimensions of organic multi-species livestock farm sustainability and their structure and management. It can help reveal sustainable strategies for organic multi-species livestock farming systems and understand levers or barriers to their development.
Highlights
AND SUMMARYThe livestock sector is being highly criticized
The raw data and the indicators can be used to investigate the relations between farm structure, management and various dimensions of farm sustainability on European organic multi-species livestock farms
Through a series of meetings, we developed an ad hoc questionnaire organized into 8 excel sheets addressing farm structure, livestock, pastures, crops, sales, inputs and byproducts, economics, and work on the farm
Summary
The livestock sector is being highly criticized. First, this sector uses 2 billion hectares of pastures and about 700 million hectares of the arable land used for cropping, which is approximately half of the global agricultural area (Mottet et al, 2017). The raw data and the indicators can be used to investigate the relations between farm structure, management and various dimensions of farm sustainability (resource use efficiency, resource conservation, productivity, human welfare, animal welfare) on European organic multi-species livestock farms. Scripts created in the R software environment were each dedicated to a specific group of tasks These tasks included processing the raw data on organic multi-species livestock farms and calculating various farm structure, management, and sustainability indicators. They were gathered in correspondence data frames, which linked specific values from our database to the Sustainability indicators were analyzed in relation to farm structure and farm management. Showed that all productivity values were within a reasonable realm for farms kept in the final database
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