Sustainable management of Swedish seminatural pastures with high species diversity

Abstract

Historically, semi-natural pastures were important for Sweden's food supply but this importance, and the area grazed, decreased strongly during the 20 th century. Remaining areas are of major importance for nature conservancy today on account of their high biodiversity and cultural values. Consequently, a national goal is to ensure that those areas still grazed are also grazed in the future and that grazing is expanded to include particularly important seminatural pastures where grazing has ceased. The aim of this paper is to consider scenarios under which economically sustainable grazing of species-rich semi-natural pastures can be achieved. These scenarios are informed both by agricultural statistics describing trends in livestock availability in Sweden and by interviews with a sample of farmers who manage valuable pastures. The statistics show a rapid decrease in number of herds and a slightly reduced number of grazing animals. Three scenarios are considered: 1, continued grazing on existing farms with the farmer's own animals; 2, nature conservancy entrepreneurs who move grazing animals around on otherwise ungrazed pastures, and 3, creating large areas of pasture-forest mosaics from existing and previously abandoned pastures and marginal arable land, thereby enabling a combination of nature conservancy and cost-efficient meat production. The interviews reveal that it would be unrealistic to expect scenario 1 alone to fulfil the conservation goal, especially in forest-dominated regions characterised by a high proportion of elderly farmers with small herds. Development of new enterprises, according to scenarios 2 and 3, is therefore an essential complement to the present EU environmental allowances if the cost of preserving grazing-dependent biodiversity is not to increase massively in the future.