Reconnecting Grazing Livestock to Crop Landscapes: Reversing Specialization Trends to Restore Landscape Multifunctionality
Autor: | Arthur Pontes-Prates, Pedro Arthur de Albuquerque Nunes, William de Souza Filho, Gilles Lemaire, Paulo César de Faccio Carvalho, Leonardo Silvestri Szymczak, Fernanda Gomes Moojen |
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Rok vydání: | 2021 |
Předmět: |
integrated crop-livestock systems
Natural resource economics media_common.quotation_subject Horticulture Management Monitoring Policy and Law foodscapes Food processing and manufacture Ecosystem services Grazing Specialization (functional) TX341-641 resilience Environmental quality biodiversity media_common Global and Planetary Change Ecology Nutrition. Foods and food supply business.industry TP368-456 Agriculture mixed crop-livestock Livestock Psychological resilience Business ecosystem services Agronomy and Crop Science Cropping Food Science |
Zdroj: | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Vol 5 (2021) |
ISSN: | 2571-581X |
Popis: | 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. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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