Tackling unintended consequences of grazing livestock farming: Multi-scale assessment of co-benefits and trade-offs for water pollution mitigation scenarios.

A farm-to-landscape scale modelling framework combining regulating services and life cycle assessment mid-point impacts for air and water was used to explore the co-benefits and trade-offs of alternative management futures for grazing livestock farms. Two intervention scenarios were compared: one using on-farm interventions typically recommended following visual farm audits (visually-based) and the other using mechanistical understanding of nutrient and sediment losses to water (mechanistically-based). At farm scale, reductions in business-as-usual emissions to water of total phosphorus (TP) and sediment, using both the visually-based and mechanistically-based scenarios, were <5%.

Quantifying the value of on-farm measurements to inform the selection of key performance indicators for livestock production systems.

The use of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assist on-farm decision making has long been seen as a promising strategy to improve operational efficiency of agriculture. The potential benefit of KPIs, however, is heavily dependent on the economic relevance of the metrics used, and an overabundance of ambiguously defined KPIs in the livestock industry has disincentivised many farmers to collect information beyond a minimum requirement. Using high-resolution sheep production data from the North Wyke Farm Platform, a system-scale grazing trial in southwest United Kingdom, this paper proposes a novel framework to quantify the information values of industry recommended KPIs, with the ultimate aim of compiling a list of variables to measure and not to measure.

Intensive management in grasslands causes diffuse water pollution at the farm scale.

Arable land use is generally assumed to be the largest contributor to agricultural diffuse pollution. This study adds to the growing evidence that conventional temperate intensively managed lowland grasslands contribute significantly to soil erosion and diffuse pollution rates. This is the first grassland study to monitor hydrological characteristics and multiple pollutant fluxes (suspended sediment [SS] and the macronutrients: total oxidized nitrogen-N [TON], total phosphorus [TP], and total carbon [TC]) at high temporal resolution (monitoring up to every 15 min) over 1 yr.