Systemwide Livestock Programme

Smart Investments in Sustainable Food Production: Revisiting Mixed Crop-Livestock Systems

M. Herrero P. K. Thornton, A. M. Notenbaert, S. Wood, S. Msangi, H. A. Freeman, D. Bossio, J. Dixon, M. Peters, J. van de Steeg, J. Lynam,  P. Parthasarathy Rao, S. Macmillan, B. Gerard, J. McDermott, C. Seré, M. Rosegrant

Farmers in mixed crop-livestock systems produce about half of the world’s food. In small holdings around the world, livestock are reared mostly on grass, browse, and nonfood biomass from maize, millet, rice, and sorghum crops and in their turn supply manure and traction for future crops. Animals act as insurance against hard times and supply farmers with a source of regular income from sales of milk, eggs, and other products. Thus, faced with population growth and climate change, small-holder farmers should be the first target for policies to intensify production by carefully managed inputs of fertilizer, water, and feed to minimize waste and environmental impact, supported by improved access to markets, new varieties, and technologies.

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Volume 32, Issue 1, Pages 1-120 (January 2010)

This special issue is the product of the First International Symposium on Farming Systems Design organized in September 2007 in Catania, Italy by the European and American Societies for Agronomy (ESA and ASA), the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society and the International Farming Systems Association.

The challenge is ‘to produce methods and tools that can be used locally by applied researchers and extension specialists to adapt cropping systems in collaboration with farmers…

• From mono-criteria to multi-criteria design. Even if the production function of cropping systems remains a major pillar of sustainability in many regions of the world, it has to be combined with an increasing number of other assessment criteria related to the negative externalities, environmental and social services of agriculture.

• From field scale to multi-scale design. For several of the processes to be manipulated in the design of these multi-functional cropping systems, the proper scale at which they operate is often larger than field scale. Examples are the landscape scale for disease management or the farm scale for socio-economics. The challenge of agronomic research is to keep the field as the biophysical unit of crop management, while developing methods and knowledge for up- and down-scaling with the traditional (farm) and new (landscape, watershed, natural ecosystems) embedding and contextual aspects of cropping systems.

• From stable to unstable environment. Designing new cropping systems is a long process and it occurs in a rapidly changing environment. This is exemplified by climate but also by the economy (prices and policies) and the changing demands and functions that society assigns to agricultural systems. The design process has therefore to integrate objectives of the resilience and flexibility of cropping systems in an unpredictable environment.’ J. Wery,  and J.W.A. Langeveld, guest editors

Documents related to first week contributions to the consultation can be found on the FAO web site.

For a brief summary of week 1: Brief_Summary_Theme1

Based on work completed in 2007, as part of the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, the articles in this special issue of ‘Agricultural Water Management’ (April 2010) provide an updated perspective on the investments and interventions needed to improve both irrigated and rainfed agriculture, and to achieve global food security goals. Furthermore, the authors shed light on the challenges and opportunities we must seize without delay, if we are to feed the world successfully by 2050 and beyond.

See the table of content of this special issue

Hoang Kim Giao, head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Animal Husbandry Department, said under the Livestock Development Strategy, the country would increase the ratio of livestock production to 38% of the total agricultural output by 2015 and 42% by 2020 from the current 30%.

By 2020 the livestock industry targets production of 5.5 mln t of meat, 14 bln eggs, and more than 1 mln t of milk. This translates into 56 kg of meat, 140 eggs, and more than 10 kg of milk per capita per year.

By then the populations of pigs, chicken, and dairy cattle are expected to increase respectively by 2%, 5%, and 11% to 35 mln pigs, 300 mln chicken and 500,000 dairy cattle.

Apart from meeting the domestic demand, the livestock industry also would target overseas markets in the future, Giao said.

Shift to industrial farming

To achieve these targets and to meet the increasing food demand, the country would modernise its animal husbandry and poultry sectors, shifting from household-based to industrial farming, he said.

It would also focus on breeding hygiene and safety and reducing diseases to improve productivity and quality, he said. Slaughterhouses and meat processing plants would be required to install waste treatment systems.

Improving the quality of animal strains and developing the animal feed industry were also vital to the sector’s development, Giao said.

Education

Courses providing farmers information on farming techniques and food safety and hygiene would be organised, he added.

The livestock sector plays an important role in Vietnam since 72% of its population lives in rural areas. However, the small scale of its operations and outdated production techniques have led to high costs, rendering the country’s livestock produce less competitive than that of other countries.

The volatility in animal feed prices and high risk of disease are also causing difficulties for animal breeders.