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There are opportunities to improve livestock family farms (LFFs) sustainability in Uruguay by using the co-innovation approach to change management practices and incorporate technologies. To harness these opportunities, between 2012 and 2015, a research project was implemented in Eastern Uruguay, where three simultaneous processes occurred at three levels: farm, region, and research team. At farm level, the work was carried out in seven LFF as case studies following three steps: (i) characterization and diagnosis; (ii) redesign; and (iii) implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. At the regional level, a participatory approach to planning, monitoring, and evaluating the project’s progress with regional stakeholders was adopted. At the team level, a Participatory Action Research approach was used. Consensus on the objectives and methods allowed for combined knowledge to solve practice-oriented problems. The 3-year project demonstrated the effectiveness in improving LFF sustainability, opened a learning space with stakeholders, and utilized a co-innovation model to improve rural development outcomes.

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In countries where livestock production based on native grasslands is an important economic activity, information on structural characteristics of forage is essential to support national policies and decisions at the farm level. Remote sensing is a good option for quantifying large areas in a relative short time, with low cost and with the possibility of analyzing annual evolution. This work aims at contributing to improve grazing management, by evaluating the ability of remote sensing information to estimate forage height, as an estimator of available biomass. Field data (forage height) of 20 commercial paddocks under grazing conditions (322 samples), and their relation to MODIS data (FPAR, LAI, MIR, NIR, Red, NDVI and EVI) were analyzed. Correlations between remote sensing information and field measurements were low, probably due to the extremely large variability found within each paddock for field observations (CV: Around 75%) and much lower when considering satellite information (MODIS: CV: 4%–6% and Landsat:CV: 12%). Despite this, the red band showed some potential (with significant correlation coefficient values in 41% of the paddocks) and justifies further exploration. Additional work is needed to find a remote sensing method that can be used to monitor grasslands height.

The objective of the present study was to characterise the behaviour of Holstein steers in three different production systems. Forty-eight castrated Holstein males were randomly divided into three groups and allocated to the following three outdoor treatments: (T1) animals confined in a yard with an area of 210 m2, (T2) animals confined in a similar-sized yard but with 6 h of access to a pasture plot, (T3) animals maintained throughout the experiment on a pasture plot. Behaviour was recorded by scan sampling, 12 h a day (from 0700 hours to 1900 hours), 3 days per week, for 4 weeks evenly distributed from Week 7 to Week 16 of the experiment. So as to assess their patterns of behaviour, a negative binomial regression, correspondence analysis and logistic regressions were performed. Grazing was the predominant behaviour among Groups T2 and T3, while ‘eating hay’ was the most frequent behaviour among Group T1. For all treatments, lying was the second-most frequent behaviour. Despite animals in T2 having access to pasture for only half of the time with respect to those in T3, there was no difference between both treatments in the time spent grazing. Correspondence analysis of behaviour as a function of weather conditions showed that several behaviours were close to certain weather conditions, e.g. ‘standing’ and ‘ruminating while standing’ were closer to light rainy weather, while ‘lying’ or ‘ruminating while lying’ were more related to sunny weather.’Lying’ tended to increase along the day in all treatments, while ‘eating hay’ increased along the day within Group T1, but decreased within Groups T2 and T3. It is concluded that the management conditions associated with the systems that were studied produced different behavioural patterns in the steers. Grazing behaviour is important for the animals, and the permanent or restricted possibility to perform it, determined by the production system, meant that the patterns of other behaviours changed to give priority to pasture intake.

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