Reconnecting Grazing Livestock to Crop Landscapes: Reversing Specialization Trends to Restore Landscape Multifunctionality

Abstract

Closely integrated crop and livestock production systems used to be the rule in agriculture before the industrial revolution. However, agricultural landscapes have undergone a massive intensification process in recent decades. This trajectory has led to uniform landscapes of specialized cropping systems or consolidated zones of intensive livestock production. Loss of diversity is at the core of increasing side effects on the environment from agriculture. The unintended consequences of specialization demand the reconciliation of food production with environmental quality. We argue that the reconnection of grazing livestock to specialized crop landscapes can restore decoupled biogeochemical cycles and reintroduce the necessary complexity to restore ecosystem functioning. Besides, the reconnection of crops and livestock promotes several ecosystem services underlying multifunctionality. We focus on the capacity of integrated crop-livestock systems to create biophysical and socioeconomic resilience that cope with weather and market oscillations. We present examples of redesigned landscapes that leverage grazing animals to optimize food production per unit of land while mitigating the externalities of specialized agriculture. We also debate mindset barriers to the shift of current specialization trends toward the design of multifunctional landscapes.

Convergence points of optimal herbage accumulation and intake rate by sheep grazing tall fescue

“…Management strategies that prioritize lower intensity of sward depletion promote less stress on plant regrowth, since there is greater leaf area remaining after grazing, which in turn is extremely important in the carbon balance process of regrowth (Figure 2) (Parsons et al, 1988; Parsons et al, 2011; Savian et al, 2020). Many studies demonstrate the importance of moderate grazing in pasture management for improving the ecosystem services (Carvalho et al, 2021) and performance of agricultural systems, such as efficiency, productivity, stability (Kunrath et al, 2020; Nunes et al, 2021; Szymczak, Carvalho et al, 2020).…”

Case study analysis of innovative producers toward sustainable integrated crop-livestock systems: trajectory, achievements, and thought process

“…Specifically looking into the diversity of plants, FR4 stated: be beneficial in the long term, but they also have short-term positive impacts on soil quality by increasing the particulate organic matter fraction of the soil carbon stock (Martins et al 2017). Moreover, under controlled grazing intensities (i.e., avoiding overgrazing or under-grazing), soil aggregation (i.e., physical aspect), nutrient availability (i.e., chemical aspects), and soil microbial activity (i.e., biological aspect) are also significantly improved when compared to cash crop rotation without livestock (de Faccio Carvalho et al 2010;Deiss et al 2020).…”

Grazing intensity and nitrogen fertilization effects on biomass and morphology of black oat roots in an integrated crop–livestock system

“…Integrated crop-livestock systems (ICLS) consist of diversified crop and livestock production within the same field, growing as an intercropping or in a rotation-succession scheme, with different seasons for crop growing and forage grazing (Carvalho et al, 2010;Moraes et al, 2014). ICLS have been increasingly adopted as a strategy to make farming more sustainable in several regions of the world (Sekaran et al, 2021), particularly in Brazil (Carvalho et al, 2010(Carvalho et al, , 2021. ICLS are known to improve nutrient cycling (Assmann et al, 2015;Deiss et al, 2019), soil C sequestration, greenhouse gases mitigation (Amadori et al, 2022;Bratti et al, 2022;Ribeiro, Ibarr et al, 2020), and animal (Carvalho et al, 2018) and crop production (Bernardon et al, 2020).…”