Review: An integrated graphical tool for analysing impacts and services provided by livestock farming.

Livestock farming is criticized for negatively impacting the environment, concerns about animal welfare and the impact of excessive meat consumption on human health. However, livestock farming provides other underappreciated and poorly communicated benefits to society in terms of employment, product quality, cultural landscapes and carbon storage by grasslands. Few attempts have been made so far to simultaneously consider the services and impacts provided by livestock production.

Review: Associations among goods, impacts and ecosystem services provided by livestock farming.

Livestock is a major driver in most rural landscapes and economics, but it also polarises debate over its environmental impacts, animal welfare and human health. Conversely, the various services that livestock farming systems provide to society are often overlooked and have rarely been quantified. The aim of analysing bundles of services is to chart the coexistence and interactions between the various services and impacts provided by livestock farming, and to identify sets of ecosystem services (ES) that appear together repeatedly across sites and through time.

Unravelling the physical, technological and economic factors driving the intensification trajectories of livestock systems.

Over the past 100 years, the French livestock sector has experienced significant intensification that has occurred in different ways across the country. Specifically, France has changed from a homogeneous state with most of the agricultural area covered by grasslands and a uniform distribution of animals, to a heterogeneous state characterised by an uneven distribution of grasslands, livestock numbers and livestock species. Studying the dynamics of this change is fundamental to the identification of drivers that shaped the various intensification trajectories and led to these different states, as well as to the prediction of future changes.

Assessing multiple goods and services derived from livestock farming on a nation-wide gradient.

Livestock farming is an essential activity in many rural areas, where it contributes to the maintenance of soil fertility and farmland biodiversity, as well as to a set of social public goods including food security, rural vitality and culture. However, livestock sustainability assessments tend to focus primarily on environmental and economic dimensions; therefore, these valuations might be limited because they do not consider the complete set of associated goods and services (GS). Hence, a need exists to recognise the multiple contributions provided by livestock to human well-being and society.

Evaluating environmental impacts of contrasting pig farming systems with life cycle assessment.

Environmental impacts of 15 European pig farming systems were evaluated in the European Union Q-PorkChains project using life cycle assessment. One conventional and two non-conventional systems were evaluated from each of the five countries: Denmark, The Netherlands, Spain, France and Germany. The data needed for calculations were obtained from surveys of 5 to 10 farms from each system.