Understanding nitrogen dynamics in the Brazilian beef industry: A comprehensive decadal analysis.

Brazil stands as a prominent beef producer and exporter, witnessing major transformations and expansions in its production chain over the past 20 years. These changes have prompted concerns regarding waste generation and environmental pressure. This study employs material flow analysis (MFA) to quantify nitrogen flows throughout the cattle slaughter process and subsequent beef consumption in Brazil, spanning from 2011 to 2021.

Brazilian soybeans as feed for livestock in Europe: an insight into the nitrogen flows.

Unlabelled: Given the agricultural demand to supply animals with food, the scope of today's soybean production and international trade can influence the nitrogen cycle. Rather than using soybeans from within the region of animal production, animal producers import nutritional supplements from distant growers. This widely opens the biogeochemical cycle of nitrogen, which reduces local recycling and increases carriage of reactive nitrogen via the supply chain.

Past intensification trajectories of livestock led to mixed social and environmental services.

Recent studies highlighted the multiple positive and negative contributions of livestock to society. Livestock production, through its direct and indirect impacts on land use, is an important driver of services provision. Although a few studies provide an account on the multiple services in different livestock systems, there is still an important knowledge gap on the drivers that contribute to the differentiation of services provisioning across areas.

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.