Global food supply: land use efficiency of livestock systems
By H. V. Zanten, H. Mollenhorst, C. Klootwijk, C. E. Middelaar, I. D. de Boer. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 2016
228 citations recorded by the source corpus.
PurposeLivestock already use most global agricultural land, whereas the demand for animal-source food (ASF) is expected to increase. To address the contribution of livestock to global food supply, we need a measure for land use efficiency of livestock systems.MethodsExisting measures capture different aspects of the debate about land use efficiency of livestock systems, such as plant productivity and the efficiency of converting feed, especially human-inedible feed, into animal products. So far, the suitability of land for cultivation of food crops has not been accounted for. Our land use ratio (LUR) includes all above-mentioned aspects and yields a realistic insight into land use efficiency of livestock systems. LUR is defined as the maximum amount of human-digestible protein (HDP) derived from food crops on all land used to cultivate feed required to produce 1 kg ASF over the amount of HDP in that 1 kg ASF. We illustrated our concept for three case systems.Results and discussionThe LUR for the case of laying hens equaled 2.08, implying that land required to produce 1 kg HDP from laying hens could directly yield 2.08 kg HDP from human food crops. For dairy cows, the LUR was 2.10 when kept on sandy soils and 0.67 when kept on peat soils. The LUR for dairy cows on peat soils was lower compared to cows on sandy soils because land used to grow grass and grass silage for cows on peats was unsuitable for direct production of food crops. A LUR <1.0 is considered efficient in terms of global food supply and implies that animals produce more HDP per square metre than crops.ConclusionsValues <1.0 demonstrate that livestock produce HDP more efficiently than crops. Such livestock systems (with a LUR < 1.0), therefore, do have a role in future food supply and therefore contribute to food security. Our LUR offers identification of livestock production systems that contribute to global food supply, i.e. systems that value land with low opportunity costs for arable production and/or by-products from crop cultivation or the food or energy industry.
Subfields: Ecology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30598f0227c5b2db2a993c3bc9cacc8dba486343
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Citations in the corpus
- Future Protein Supply and Demand: Strategies and Factors Influencing a Sustainable Equilibrium (2017, background): “This in turn will increase the conversion of forests, wetlands and natural grasslands into agricultural lands, which in itself has negative consequences for GHG emissions, biodiversity and other important ecosystem services [4].”
- The environmental sustainability of insects as food and feed. A review (2017, background): “A noteworthy exception are marginal lands which can be used for ruminants, but are unsuitable for crop production (Van Zanten et al. 2016).”