Reconnecting cropping and livestock operations to enhance circularity and avoid ecological collapse

Authors: Franzluebbers, Alan; MARTIN, GUILLAUME - Inrae

Submitted to: Grasslands Federation European Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/26/2022
Publication Date: 6/30/2022
Citation: Franzluebbers, A.J., Martin, G. 2022. Reconnecting cropping and livestock operations to enhance circularity and avoid ecological collapse. Grasslands Federation European Proceedings. 27:505-514.

Interpretive Summary: Industrialization of agriculture in the last 70 years has resulted in simplification of biotic resources on farms that causes problems with resilience to pests, market vagaries, and climate change. More complex agricultural systems with integrated crop and livestock operations intertwined on farms or among farms could provide important benefits to build agricultural resilience. An ARS scientist in Raleigh North Carolina collaborated with a scientist from INRAE in Castanet-Tolosan, France to summarize recent research on diversifying agricultural systems with perennial and annual forages to create more diverse and functional agricultural systems to meet production and environmental goals. This research will be presented at the European Federation of Grasslands Congress in Caen, France. Results of this effort will benefit farmers, extension specialists, scientists, and policy makers in developing more resilient agricultural systems.

Technical Abstract: Agriculture has undergone dramatic changes over the past century. Many would argue that the changes have been unquestionably positive with huge gains in productivity, reduced labour requirements, and alleviation of food insecurity for most people. However, the adoption of increasingly specialized and separated crop and livestock enterprises has also had widespread negative consequences on biodiversity simplification, degradation of groundwater and surface waters with agrochemical pollutants, poor soil health with monoculture crop production, large greenhouse gas emissions from both specialized cropping systems relying on external inputs and concentrated animal feeding operations that accumulate wastes, and general lack of ecological integrity among components of these specialized systems. Integrated systems offer opportunities to reconnect the synergies available when mixed croplivestock systems rely on organic-based nutrient cycling dynamics, ecologically based weed, insect and disease controls, and system-level sharing of resources in a circular-based agroecosystem. We provide a few examples of how annual and perennial forages can be an integral component of integrated croplivestock systems, including grazing of cover crops, pasture-crop rotations, and among-farm integration. To be truly sustainable, the ecological integrity of agriculture requires different types of forages utilized across a diverse landscape.