Integrated Crop-Livestock System: a worldwide stake to conciliate agricultural production and environment preservation

This paper examines how the global intensification of agriculture through system simplification and specialization has led to severe environmental impacts across soil, water, and biodiversity. It hypothesizes that uniform production systems, more than production intensity itself, drive these degradations. The author advocates restoring and increasing diversity within and among cropping and livestock systems by integrating grassland-based ruminant production with arable farming. Such integration, enabled by spatial and temporal interactions, enhances coupling of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles, thus reducing emissions to the atmosphere and water bodies. Integration can occur at the farm scale when socio-economic conditions allow, or at the territorial level through industrial ecology cooperation among specialized farms and processing industries.