The contribution of goats in the future redesigning of livestock activities and value chains

Abstract

While the evolution of goat farming around the world has been in line with the prospects set out in the early 2000s, we explore how environmental, social and climate change issues could reconfigure goat activities for the next decades. Our starting point is that the need to reduce their environmental footprint and their greenhouse gas emissions, will deeply affect all farming activities. Driven by the growing demand for goat milk products, the goat industry has continued to develop dairy production and its intensification in Europe but also on other continents either for niche markets or in emerging countries like China and India. One main characteristic of goats and in particular of local breeds is to be very resilient and adaptable to climatic stresses. In addition, they have the ability to make use of irregular and low quality fodder resources such as those of the large areas of often-abandoned scrublands in the Mediterranean pastoral areas and elsewhere. Most of the goats are today, more and more kept by poor small holders from Africa, Asia or America. We characterize the contribution of goat farming to climate change compared to other species and analyze its prospects for mitigating its impact. For this industry, the mitigation perspectives of environmental impacts of goats could be important by the implementation of Precision Livestock farming (PLF). The designing of new production models to increase the valuation and manage these spontaneous fodder resources while improving the performance of goats from an agro-ecological perspective constitutes a major challenge for the future of goat farming and invites us rethink more generally the relationship between people and their resources.