Mixed crop-livestock (MC-L) farming has gained broad consensus as an economically and environmentally sustainable farming system. Working on a Charolais-area suckler cattle farms network, we subdivided the 66 farms of a constant sample, for 2 years (2010 and 2011), into four groups: (i) 'specialized conventional livestock farms' (100% grassland-based farms (GF), n = 7); (ii) 'integrated conventional crop-livestock farms' (specialized farms that only market animal products but that grow cereal crops on-farm for animal feed, n = 31); (iii) 'mixed conventional crop-livestock farms' (farms that sell beef and cereal crops to market, n = 21); and (iv) organic farms (n = 7). We analyse the differences in structure and in drivers of technical, economic and environmental performances. The figures for all the farms over 2 years (2010 and 2011) were pooled into a single sample for each group. The farms that sell crops alongside beef miss out on potential economies of scale. These farms are bigger than specialized beef farms (with or without on-farm feed crops) and all types of farms show comparable economic performances. The big MC-L farms make heavier and consequently less efficient use of inputs. This use of less efficient inputs also weakens their environmental performances. This subpopulation of suckler cattle farms appears unable to translate a MC-L strategy into economies of scope. Organic farms most efficiently exploit the diversity of herd feed resources, thus positioning organic agriculture as a prototype MC-L system meeting the core principles of agroecology.

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Over the past 23 years (1990 to 2012), French beef cattle farms have expanded in size and increased labour productivity by over 60%, chiefly, though not exclusively, through capital intensification (labour-capital substitution) and simplifying herd feeding practices (more concentrates used). The technical efficiency of beef sector production systems, as measured by the ratio of the volume value (in constant euros) of farm output excluding aids to volume of intermediate consumption, has fallen by nearly 20% while income per worker has held stable thanks to subsidies and the labour productivity gains made. This aggregate technical efficiency of beef cattle systems is positively correlated to feed self-sufficiency, which is in turn negatively correlated to farm and herd size. While volume of farm output per hectare of agricultural area has not changed, forage feed self-sufficiency decreased by 6 percentage points. The continual increase in farm size and labour productivity has come at a cost of lower production-system efficiency -a loss of technical efficiency that 20 years of genetic, technical, technological and knowledge-driven progress has barely managed to offset.