Higher sustainability performance of intensive grazing versus zero-grazing dairy systems

Abstract

Although grazing of dairy cows is an integral part of dairy farming in many European countries, farmers today more often choose for zero-grazing systems, where cows are housed throughout the year. Some studies already compared grazing and zero-grazing systems for specific issues such as labor efficiency, environmental impact, or animal welfare. In our study, we perform a more integrated evaluation, considering relevant ecological, economic, and social aspects. This allows for a balanced and more complete comparison of the sustainability performance of the two production methods. We evaluated ten intensive grazing and ten zero-grazing specialized Flemish dairy farms on the use of nutrients and energy, productivity and profitability, labor input, and animal welfare. In addition, we put special effort in formulating useful management advice for farmers. Therefore, we combined a detailed analysis of the sustainability indicators with an intensive interaction and discussion with farmers and farm advisors. Results show that, on average, the zero-grazing farms performed significantly worse from an ecological and economic point of view. This fact is explained mainly due to a less efficient use of concentrates and byproducts. Social sustainability performance did not differ significantly between the two groups. As a result, the integrated sustainability performance was significantly lower for the zero-grazing group. This finding shows that a further shift from intensive grazing to zero-grazing can move dairy farming in Flanders further away from sustainability. An important advice to improve the ecological and economic performance of zero-grazing farms is to optimize cows' rations to include more forages and optimize forage production and use. More detailed site-and case-specific management advice for farmers of both groups was provided during a discussion meeting. We consider this an essential additional step to any sustainability evaluation, since progress can only be made when monitoring results are translated into practical measures.

Biophysical and economic water productivity of dual-purpose cattle farming

“…In our study, irrigation represented 87.9% of the total amount of water applied to maize, implying that such it exerts the highest pressure on groundwater of the forage crops existing in the area. These results agree with previous assessments in temperate countries showing that the development of forage systems based on maize may exacerbate pressure on groundwater (Meul et al, 2012). DM yields for all fodder crops were highly variable among farms and appear to be lower than those in recent references, for example in the case of berseem clover (Vasilakoglou and Dhima, 2008).…”

Role of input self-sufficiency in the economic and environmental sustainability of specialised dairy farms

“…Concerning the environmental and economic sustainability, our results show that increasing the EA level allows the farms to have better environmental and economic results. From an environmental point of view, several studies have reported that farms using fewer concentrates and mineral fertilisers have lower nitrogen surplus and energy consumption (Hansen et al, 2001;Paccard et al, 2003;Meul et al, 2012). In our case study, this relationship was established whatever the unit in which the indicators were expressed: per hectare or per unit of product.…”

“…Including higher proportions of forage in the diet constitutes a possible path to reduce the use of concentrates without decreasing the output level. It could be achieved through the optimisation of forage and grassland management, and by avoiding losses during grazing, harvesting, preservation and feeding (Meul et al, 2012). Havet et al (2014) mentioned as an example the use of grassland calendars with a visual assessment of the grass height to optimise the management of grass quality during rotational grazing.…”

“…However, despite better performance of more autonomous farms, breaking away from existing routines needs specific management skills and requires social influences (e.g. objectives of extension services and organisation of the dairy industry) to be overcome (Meul et al, 2012;Veysset et al, 2014).…”

Key characteristics for tool choice in indicator-based sustainability assessment at farm level

“…During tool development, the aims of the tool developers are not always clear or cannot always be fulfilled (Triste et al 2014). Additionally, the tool used in practice can offer different functions, irrespective of the developers' aim during development (Langeveld et al 2007, Schader et al 2014): a tool can provide a platform for communication through describing the sustainability themes, i.e., communication function (De Mey et al 2011); it can promote the exchange of ideas and knowledge, i.e., learning function (Terrier et al 2010, De Mey et al 2011, Gerrard et al 2011, and further induce management responses, i.e., management function (Grenz et al 2009); and it can fulfill monitoring obligations (Wiek and Binder 2005, Grenz et al 2009, Meul et al 2012) for statutory control purposes or for product certification, i.e., monitoring and certification function (Hülsbergen 2003, Rodrigues et al 2010. Furthermore, the methodological steps within tools may contain significant biases toward specific framings of sustainability (Bond and Morrison-Saunders 2011).…”