What is it about?
Agroecology offers a scientific and operational framework for moving animal production systems toward sustainability while meeting the forecasted increasing demand for livestock products. Another big challenge will be to propose sound strategies to scale up agroecology at larger scales than that of the farm. In this paper, we identify key research issues to increase knowledge on the technical and organizational innovations that are needed to redesign industrial farming systems and increase small-farm production based on the stimulation of natural processes.
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Why is it important?
Agroecology opens a challenging research agenda for the animal science community. In this paper, we identify key research issues that define this agenda. We first stress the need to assess animal robustness by measurable traits, to analyze trade-offs between production and adaptation traits at within-breed and between-breed level, and to better understand how group selection, epigenetics and animal learning shape performance. Second, we propose research on the nutritive value of alternative feed resources, including the environmental impacts of producing these resources and their associated non-provisioning services. Third, we look at how the design of animal production systems based on agroecological principles valorizes interactions between system components and promotes biological diversity at multiple scales to increase system resilience. Acknowledging the ecology of contexts and analyzing the rationales behind traditional small-scale systems will increase our understanding of mechanisms contributing to the success or failure of agroecological practices and systems. Fourth, the large-scale development of agroecological products will require analysis of resistance to change among farmers and other actors in the food chain.
Perspectives
The redesign of animal production systems using agroecology principles will demand a whole set of innovations targeting the different components of the farm and the food chain, from farmers to consumers. The agroecological transition will involve deep changes and more dynamic and integrative perceptions of each system component and their interactions. We showed that a vast research agenda is opened for the animal science community, with three crucial challenges. First, it will demand a paradigm shift for scientific disciplines. While previous works has long been developed within the control paradigm where system management aims to avoid disturbances the coming challenges will lead to the design of animal production systems with the robustness and resilience needed to readily handle disturbances. Second, it should be developed by increasing inter-disciplinary research among animal scientists, ecologists, economists and sociologists. Third, it calls for a new approach for the whole research development innovation chain to bridge the gap between science and practice. We foresee the need to create initiatives at local, regional, national and/or international levels to accelerate the uptake of innovation, and the scale up of agroecology. These initiatives should enroll farmers, scientists, advisers, NGOs and/or enterprises in participatory effort to reach common objectives.
Bertrand Dumont
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Forty research issues for the redesign of animal production systems in the 21st century, animal, January 2014, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1017/s1751731114001281.
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