Trade-offs and synergies between livestock production and other ecosystem services

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges today is to satisfy an increasing food demand while preserving ecosystem services. Farming systems have a huge impact on land cover and land use, it is therefore vital to understand how land cover and land use allocation can promote synergies between food production and other ecosystem services. Livestock production has multiple interactions with other ecosystem services and can promote synergies especially in grasslands. We investigated the interactions between livestock production and other ecosystem services and explored strategies to soften trade-offs and enhance synergies. We considered four ecosystem services (livestock production, crop production, carbon sequestration, and timber growth) in France. We considered 709 land units covering a wide range of farming systems where both food production and other ecosystem services are provided. For each land unit, we built ecological production functions that are models measuring the statistical influence of driving variables (i.e. land cover, land use, pesticide expense, and climate) on the provision of ecosystem services. Using an optimization procedure, we studied the extent to which livestock production could be increased without reducing other ecosystem services and without increasing total pesticide expense. We found that a 20% increase in livestock production could be achieved by all farming systems in France under those general constraints. The 709 land units could be grouped based on similar combinations of increases or decreases in specific ecosystem services during the optimization. 48% of land units were specialised on food production, 24% were specialised on other ecosystem services, 16% were specialised on the mixed provision of food production and other ecosystem services, whereas the remaining 12% showed decrease or no change in all ecosystem services. Livestock production was either in trade-off or in synergy with the other ecosystem services. The trade-offs could be softened through intensified use of cultivated land and spatial segregation of livestock production. The synergies could be enhanced only through major grassland expansion.