System diversification and grazing management as resilience-enhancing agricultural practices: The case of crop-livestock integration

Land-Use Intensification Trends in the Rio De La Plata Region of South America: Toward Specialization or Recoupling Crop and Livestock Production

“…Diverse ICLS contributions to productivity, resource use efficiency, stability and sustainability have been demonstrated in some regional studies [12,[39][40][41][42] . Cultivated pastures in rotation with crops complement the lower productivity and quality of native pastures, reduce the need for pesticides, increase biodiversity, fix biological nitrogen, improve soil quality, sequester soil carbon and control soil erosion, determining higher crop productivity [14,39,[43][44][45] .…”

Resilience of an Integrated Crop–Livestock System to Climate Change: A Simulation Analysis of Cover Crop Grazing in Southern Brazil

“…A number of recent studies have attempted to formulate proxies of resilience that characterize resistance toward stressful environmental conditions and/or increased capacity to respond to favorable conditions or recover after disturbance (e.g., Standish et al, 2014;Groot et al, 2016;Gil et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019). For example, Szymczak et al (2020) used Ecological Network Analysis to assess the resilience of nitrogen and phosphorus flows to multiple disturbances (e.g., overgrazing, drought, soil acidification) in a diversified crop-livestock system in Brazil. Although farms and agricultural landscapes are coupled social-ecological systems that require holistic assessment of resilience at multiple scales and across domains, development of simplified, biophysical proxies of resilience and adaptive capacity (i.e., the ability to maintain function by changing in response to disturbance) represent crucial attempts to make the concept of resilience operational for intensive production systems.…”

“…Recoupling of specialized crop and livestock operations as integrated crop-livestock systems (ICLSs) has shown promise as a sustainable intensification strategy (Peterson et al, 2020) as indicated by shifts in soil biological, physical, and chemical properties (Carvalho et al, 2018;Deiss et al, 2019), water and nutrient cycling (Assmann et al, 2015;Martins et al, 2016a), and plant-soil interactions (Peterson et al, 2019), typically without significantly affecting soybean grain productivity (Kunrath et al, 2015). ICLSs are also reported for foster climate change resilience via buffering mechanisms in both field-level biophysical processes, e.g., nutrient cycling (Szymczak et al, 2020) or improved crop productivity (Tracy and Zhang, 2008), and farm-level socioeconomics, e.g., economic risk mitigation and livelihood diversification (Bell et al, 2014).…”

Water quality of an integrated crop–livestock system in the northern Great Plains

“…Integrated crop-livestock systems (ICL) diversify agricultural production by moving from specialized and concentrated agricultural systems focused on crop or livestock pro-including crop yield (Alves et al, 2020;Franzluebbers, Sawchik, & Taboada, 2014;Szymczak et al, 2020), soil health (Alves et al, 2020;Franzluebbers et al, 2014;Liebig et al, 2017), greenhouse gas flux (de Bastos et al, 2020;Liebig et al, 2020;Ribeiro, Ibarr, Besen, Bayer, & Piva, 2019;Singh, Abagandura, & Kumar, 2020), and economic sustainability (Halloran & Archer, 2008). Several studies have suggested less water quality degradation associated with ICL systems (Burkart, James, Liebman, & Herndl, 2005;Franzluebbers, 2007;Sulc & Tracy, 2007), but did not directly quantify water quality parameters.…”

“…Globally, many forms of ICL systems have been studied, with research demonstrating potential for environmental, economic, and social sustainability (Allen, Baker, Segarra, & Brown, 2007; Russelle & Franzluebbers, 2007; Sanderson et al., 2013). These systems have been studied from a variety of different perspectives including crop yield (Alves et al., 2020; Franzluebbers, Sawchik, & Taboada, 2014; Szymczak et al., 2020), soil health (Alves et al., 2020; Franzluebbers et al., 2014; Liebig et al., 2017), greenhouse gas flux (de Bastos et al., 2020; Liebig et al., 2020; Ribeiro, Ibarr, Besen, Bayer, & Piva, 2019; Singh, Abagandura, & Kumar, 2020), and economic sustainability (Halloran & Archer, 2008).…”