Nutrient provision capacity of alternative livestock farming systems per area of arable farmland required.

Although climate impacts of ruminant agriculture are a major concern worldwide, using policy instruments to force grazing farms out of the livestock industry may diminish opportunities to produce nutritious food without exacerbating the food-feed competition for fertile and accessible land resources. Here, we present a new set of quantitative evidence to demonstrate that, per unit of overall nutrient value supplied by a given commodity, the demand for land suitable for human-edible crop production is considerably smaller under ruminant systems than monogastric systems, and consistently so at both farm and regional scales. We also demonstrate that imposition of a naïvely designed "red meat tax" has the potential to invite socioeconomic losses far greater than its environmental benefits, due largely to the induced misallocation of resources at the national scale. Our results reiterate the risk inherent in an excessively climate-focused debate on the role of livestock in human society and call for more multidimensional approaches of sustainability assessment to draw better-balanced policy packages.

Past intensification trajectories of livestock led to mixed social and environmental services.

Recent studies highlighted the multiple positive and negative contributions of livestock to society. Livestock production, through its direct and indirect impacts on land use, is an important driver of services provision. Although a few studies provide an account on the multiple services in different livestock systems, there is still an important knowledge gap on the drivers that contribute to the differentiation of services provisioning across areas. We investigated the hypothesis that the current level of services has derived from past intensification trajectories of livestock. The objective of this study was to understand the influences of past changes in livestock, land-use and socio-economic variables on the current provision of social, environmental and cultural services by the livestock sector in France. We combined a long-term country-wide database on livestock intensification between 1938 and 2010 and a database on services provisioning in 2010. We used a set of multivariate methods to simultaneously analyse the changes in livestock intensification from 1938 to 2010 and the current level of services provisioning. Our analysis focused on a set of 60 French departments where livestock play a significant economic role in agricultural production. Our study revealed that the provision of services was spatially structured and based on three groups of departments, characterised by different rates of change in intensification variables. In the first group, 'Intensive livestock areas', the high level of employment in the livestock sector was mainly associated with high rates of change in monogastric stocking rates (+1045%) and milk productivity (+451%). In the second group, 'Extensive livestock areas', the high levels of environmental and cultural services were mainly associated with moderate rates of change in herbivores stocking rate (+95%) and the stability of grassland area (+13%). In the third group, 'Transition areas', the low provision of all services was associated with the decline in livestock due to crop expansion. This study provides knowledge to understand how past changes determined the current contribution of livestock areas in providing differentiated bundles of services, which might help steer the development of the current livestock sector towards more sustainable trajectories.

Unravelling the physical, technological and economic factors driving the intensification trajectories of livestock systems.

Over the past 100 years, the French livestock sector has experienced significant intensification that has occurred in different ways across the country. Specifically, France has changed from a homogeneous state with most of the agricultural area covered by grasslands and a uniform distribution of animals, to a heterogeneous state characterised by an uneven distribution of grasslands, livestock numbers and livestock species. Studying the dynamics of this change is fundamental to the identification of drivers that shaped the various intensification trajectories and led to these different states, as well as to the prediction of future changes. Hence, the objective of this study was to characterise the trajectories undertaken by the French livestock sector to understand the intensification process and the role of socioeconomic, land use and production-related factors. A set of 10 indicators was employed to analyse the main changes between 1938 and 2010, using principal component analysis followed by a clustering of the 88 French departments. Between 1938 and 2010, significant increases in farm size, mechanisation, labour productivity and the stocking rates of monogastrics enabled the French livestock sector to double its production. The most important changes involved mechanisation (with the number of tractors per hectare (ha) rising from 0.0012 to 0.0053), labour productivity (improving from 8.6 to 35.9 ha/worker), livestock production (e.g. milk production increasing from 758 to 1856 l/ha of fodder area) and stocking rates (rising from 0.57 to 0.98 livestock units (LU) per ha). The increased heterogeneity apparent in the patterns of change throughout France's departments was captured by clustering four trajectories. Two trajectories were formed by departments that experienced strong specialisation towards livestock production, with one type mainly orientated towards high-intensive dairy, poultry and pig landless production systems, and a second type orientated towards extensive beef grazing production systems. Another trajectory corresponded to departments that specialised in crop production with high labour productivity; mixed crop-livestock systems were still maintained at the margins of this group of departments. The fourth trajectory corresponded to the lowest livestock population and productivity levels. The increase in mechanisation during the period was important but uniform, with no significant differences between the trajectories. This typology of intensification trajectories will enable the targeting of specific areas in which the detrimental impacts of livestock intensification require mitigation and provide guidance for future livestock sector developments.