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Title: | Survey Data on European Organic Multi-Species Livestock Farms | Authors: | Ulukan, Defne Steinmetz, Lucille Moerman, Marie Bernes, Gun Blanc, Mathilde Brock, Christopher Destruel, Marie Dumont, Bertrand Lang, Elise Meischner, Tabea Moraine, Marc Oehen, Bernadette Parsons, David Primi, Riccardo Ronchi, Bruno Schanz, Lisa Vanwindekens, Frédéric Veysset, Patrick Winckler, Christoph Martin, Guillaume Benoit, Marc |
Journal: | FRONTIERS IN SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS | Issue Date: | 2021 | Abstract: | 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). Livestock also consumes one third of the worldwide cereal production (Mottet et al., 2017). Using these cereals for meat, milk, and egg production is less efficient than their direct consumption by humans, which signifies strong competition between animal feed and human food availability (Ertl et al., 2015; Muscat et al., 2020). Second, the dominant model of industrial livestock production has well-established direct and indirect impacts on deforestation, climate change, water pollution, soil acidification, and biodiversity (Herrero et al., 2015; Leip, 2015). There is therefore increasing pressure from governments and citizens to step away from this currently dominant model and make more efficient and sustainable use of natural resources (Bai et al., 2018; Bowles et al., 2019). Agroecology is increasingly promoted as a solution to the multiple sustainability issues of world agriculture (Tomich et al., 2011; Holt-Giménez and Altieri, 2013) including in the livestock sector (Dumont et al., 2013). It entails moving toward more diversified farming systems (Kremen et al., 2012), i.e., livestock farming systems includingmultiple breeds of a given livestock species,multiple animal species and even a diversity of crops and pastures. These diversified systems are expected to promote ecosystem services, allowing reductions of input use, to stabilize production levels and income over time (Di Falco and Chavas, 2009; Dardonville et al., 2020), and to strengthen farm resilience (Dumont, 2020).While there is increasing evidence of the environmental and economic benefits of diversified systems in the organic cropping sector (Wachter et al., 2019; Wieme et al., 2020), this has been much less investigated with organic livestock farming. Multi-species livestock systems are farms where two or more animal species are raised simultaneously. Interactions among these two or more species can take multiple forms e.g., cograzing where species graze pastures simultaneously, sequential grazing where they follow one another at separate times, by-product (e.g., whey) flows from one species to another. These multispecies livestock systems have received little attention so far (Martin, 2020). Nevertheless, cograzing experiments conducted at fine spatial scales (i.e., usually at the level of a field) and over relatively short time horizons (a few weeks) have revealed promising as co-grazing proved to be efficient in natural resource use, while reducing a number of environmental impacts and providing opportunities for animal health management (Sehested et al., 2004; Fraser et al., 2014; Cuchillo- Hilario et al., 2018). More comprehensive assessments considering the various dimensions of farm sustainability are therefore needed to confirm these promises and provide management opportunities at the farm level. Threshold effects may indeed occur when upscaling experimental outcomes obtained at the field level onto commercial farms. Motivated by the aforementioned, a survey was conducted in seven European countries between October 2018 and July 2019 that recorded data across 128 multi-species livestock farms. The survey was comprehensive and aimed at gathering data regarding farm structure (farm area, herd size, total number of workers, off-farm activity, etc.), land use (crop and pasture types and areas;management i.e., fertilization, etc.; productivity), livestock management (types of livestock; management i.e., reproduction, diet, housing, health, etc.; productivity), input management (types of products purchased, amounts, etc.), byproduct management (types of by-products available, transfers of by-products among farm enterprises, etc.), sales management (on-farm processing, types of product sold, direct selling, etc.), economics (income, satisfaction regarding income) and work conditions (work organization, satisfaction regarding the workload, etc.). Qualitative data on strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats perceived by farmers were also collected. The overall database consists of the raw data (1,574 variables) and 107 indicators calculated using these variables and reflecting farm structure, management and sustainability of 102 farms. After technical validation, we had to withdraw 26 farms that displayed inconsistent data. 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. It can also serve as a basis to understand the levers and barriers to the development of organic multi-species livestock farming. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2067/46111 | ISSN: | 2571-581X | DOI: | 10.3389/fsufs.2021.685778 | Rights: | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States |
Appears in Collections: | A1. Articolo in rivista |
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