Environmental Benefits of Farm- and District-Scale Crop-Livestock Integration

Specialized farms and districts generally perform poorly when assessed in terms of environmental impact or ecosystem services provision. Well-managed synergies between crop and livestock production occurring either at the farm scale or at the district scale have the potential to limit environmental problems via, for example, nutrient cycle closure and diversified crop rotations and land uses. However, there is a lack of research using empirical farm data to quantify the actual benefits or drawbacks of crop-livestock integration strategies. Therefore, a farming system approach was used in the “Crops and Animal Together” project (FP7 Project CANTOGETHER) to assess diverse strategies of crop-livestock integration at both farm (10 farms in FR, NL, IT, IE, UK) and district levels (5 districts in ES, IE, FR, NL, CH). The district-level strategies assessed were (1) local exchange of materials among farms (grain, slurry); (2) provision of high-quality forages (cooperative dehydration facility); (3) land exchange between dairy and arable farms; and (4) animal exchanges between lowland and highland regions (heifer rearing). A selection of noncooperating baseline farms (specialized and, where available, mixed) were compared with specialized cooperating farms in each district