Agroecological, sustainable intensification: A story of great potential, barriers and open questions

Agroecology and sustainable intensification are two independent approaches to agriculture. The combination of the two has provided promising results and is therefore gaining more attention by the scientific community. However, because of its recency, there are still many open questions and issues that need to be addressed.

Globally, there is an obvious demand for sustainable meat production, suggests Prof. Dr. Bertrand Dumont, who gave his lecture “Make Ruminants Great Again: How Can Sustainable Intensification and Agroecology Converge for a Better Future”*, as part of the “Rethinking Agriculture” seminar series. According to Prof. Dumont, animal production systems are responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, use up one third of produced crops, and occupy 50-70% of agricultural land. In short, it contributes significantly to climate change and ecological degradation.

In particular, ruminants are the black sheep of agriculture: They are one of the main causes of deforestation and facilitate global warming due to methane production, while being unable to feed the world.

As a response to these challenges, more and more farmers have recently adopted technologies which promote biodiversity and a full range of ecosystem services. These agroecological measures, as defined by the FAO, are “[…] the science of applying ecological concepts and principles to manage interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment for food security and nutrition.” Another approach to solving eco-social challenges caused by ruminant ranching is sustainable intensification, which aims to increase yields without additional adverse environmental impacts and without claiming further land for agriculture.

Prof. Dumont believes that these two concepts can be powerful instruments. Indeed, sustainable intensification is offering an increase in food production by improving performance and input use efficiency, thereby, closing the yield gap as well as improving stocking rates. Agroecology follows similar principles by promoting biodiversity, protecting insects, decreasing pollution, and by a strong focus on animal health and disease prevention.

Sounds promising, right? Especially since the agroecology strategy is also economically worthwhile, as Prof. Dumont claims. For example, even a slight loss of productivity of dairy systems due to moderate input is compensated by substantial gross margin raise while positively affecting the environment.

However, it is not all rosy, as the report “The Role of Agroecology in Sustainable Intensification” shows (Land Use Policy Group, UK, 2015). The authors of the report illustrate the barriers in combining agroecology and sustainable intensification, the main arguments of which are listed below.

1) Sustainable intensification remains ill-defined and adding the level of agroecology to it only aggravates this problem. Thus, it does not surprise that there is a lack of knowledge about it, both in public and academia, which raises the question: How do you spread the knowledge? Even more, it remains unclear how such a management system needs to be regulated. For instance, should there be implemented global prescriptions, and how much scope should farmers have for finding specific local solutions? We believe that this system can only be established in our society if its goals, practices, and market implementation are clearly delineated, making it a contestant to other ‘ecological’ seals like Bio.

2) Agroecological research is often more about gaining pure knowledge rather than inventing new technologies and marketable products. However, since research is predominantly funded by the private sector, this impedes research funding inflow. And even governmental financial support usually goes directly to system intensification, as Prof. Dumont observed. The lack of funding may, ultimately, lead to dispersed research that is often not well-connected to the practical operations on the farm. Therefore, a reform of the funding mechanisms, better research co-ordination and integration of research into farming practices need to take place.

3) Sustainable intensification already introduces farmers to some novel cropping practices. Combining it with agroecological approaches might generate more uncertainty and risks than a farmer is willing to take. There is currently a lack of data on how well such a system performs financially. Without information on financial viability, it remains unclear if agroecological, sustainable intensification will be accepted on a larger scale. The possibility of farmers and policy/market actors sharing the risks is still to be discussed.

Those are only a few of the questions which are being discussed in the scientific community. Many more arouse public attention – this is obvious from the number of questions which were posed during the discussion following Prof. Dumont’s presentation. However, because of time constraints, not all of them could be answered. Fortunately, Prof. Dumont was nice enough to answer most of the remaining questions in written form:

• Is it possible to feed 9.5 billion people with 1/3 of animal products in a greenhouse-gas-neutral way?

The scenarios I presented were based on land use. I also recommend reading Van Kernebeek et al. (2016) Inter. J. Life Cycle Assess. 21, 677-687 showing that minimal agricultural use of land in the Netherlands was achieved when 12% of Dutch protein intake was supplied by livestock products because the use of co-products from human food and forages from grassland was optimised. I cannot say whether this would lead to a neutral carbon balance but part of enteric methane emissions would be compensated by grassland sequestration in grasslandsoils as long as grasslands are properly managed (see my slide n°17).

• It is predicted that meat substitute products (e.g., Beyond Meat) will be on the rise in the coming decade. What impact do you think will this development have on livestock/meat production systems? Will "real" meat be sustainable and become a privilege for the rich only?

I think it may represent an acceptable alternative to people whose personal ethics is against killing animals for providing food. But at this stage we have little information on its real environmental impacts so that the potential advantages of cultured meat for greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of controversy. Of course, less land would be used compared to livestock farming.

For me, this is mainly a societal choice since we would be moving meat production from a mostly local production system (considering grassland-based meat production) that supports a large number of farmers to a production model equivalent to that of pharmaceutical laboratories, with probably low-cost but patent-protected production in the future. I respect the personal choice of anyone to be a vegan but I fear that most vegans are not fully aware that by choosing ‘beyond meat’ companies they are also serving the interests of capitalism…

• To what degree and how can local farmers be included in agroecological processes?

Indeed, agroecology places strong value on local knowledge and places farmers as the designers of their production system. Engaging with farmers and local stakeholders to generate actionable knowledge that is ‘knowledge that specifically support decision making and consequent actions ‘ (Geertsema et al., 2016, Front. Ecol. Environ., 14, 209-216) allows for the fostering of agroecological innovations. We have discussed this in a recent perspective paper entitled ‘Mobilizing ecological processes for herbivore production: Farmers and researchers learning together’ (Dumont et al., 2020, Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 4, 544828) in which you can find case studies and a number of recent references.

• Do you think a proposal for replacement of animal protein with plant protein is a good idea?

Sure it’s a good idea. Most sustainable scenarios propose to decrease by around 50% the share of animal proteins in European diets and doing this to increase the share of plant proteins. And for remaining sources of animal proteins it is crucial to decrease feed-food competition and so to graze ruminants, while pigs and poultry would mostly be fed with crop residues.

• Given the intensity of knowledge required at policy and production level, how does the eater make a choice?

First it remains difficult to share the positive services provided by grassland-based herbivore farming (climate regulation as the result of carbon sequestration, aesthetic value of landscapes, etc.) with consumers and citizens so that they can develop their own system of consumption ethics. This also calls to investigate their willingness to pay for the services provided by livestock farming. Apart from organic farming and PDO products, which are usually based on strict production specifications, most product labels are indeed vague, unverified and unverifiable…The labels may thus mistakenly claim that a product or production method offers an environmental, human health or animal welfare benefit, although legal European and notional instruments have recently made progress.

Also be aware that in Latin America, agroecology did not operate through any standard or certification system, while this might change in the future.

• Could original/traditional/old species be well integrated in such new agroecosystems? Or do we need to think about new breeds of ruminants?

I suggest you look at the two reviews coordinated by F. Phocas and that were published in 2016 in Animal (pages 1749-1759 and 1760-1769). They deal with the agroecological management of ruminants, pigs and poultry through the development of sustainable breeding programmes. Their conclusion is that, at least in Europe, reorienting current breeding programmes (by accounting more on adaptive traits) seems to be more effective than developing programmes dedicated to agroecological systems that will struggle to be really effective because of the small size of the populations currently concerned so far.

* Dumont, B., Groot, J. & Tichit, M. (2018). Review: Make ruminants green again – how can sustainable intensification and agroecology converge for a better future? Animal, 12, 210-219. doi:10.1017/S1751731118001350

Authors: Thomas Köhler, Maria Kunle

Comments:

dnpatrice2001

As published by Dumont et al. (2020), grazing systems transition to agroecological or organic systems reveal three complementary research approaches. First, the use of farm networks and farm system models generate generic knowledge by investigating the complexity, diversity and long-term dynamics of grassland based agroecosystems. Accordingly, multi-criteria methods such as Pareto frontiers and positive déviances are used to identify farmers with outstanding economic and environmental performance. Second, farmlet experiments allow production of technical and practical knowledge under long-term and well-controlled settings. These experiments allow not only to integrate scientific knowledge, but also to test for innovative and risky management options that would have led to unacceptable learning costs if tested on commercial farms. Third, participative situations where farmers team up with researchers and technical advisers in identifying the main system problems and implementing options to improve them are likely to generate situational knowledge with territorial scope. In addition to the three approaches, we may add the fourth one. Systems thinking provides the necessary bases for linking multiple sources of knowledge and some general concepts that help to reflect and structure transdisciplinary research. In the system, the elements interact in a way that new collective patterns and regularities emerge such that larger entities hold properties the individual elements do not exhibit.

dnpatrice2001

Apart from the main crop which spreads on more than half of the available land, the farmer devotes his farm to many other crops. Fallow plots are used to graze livestock. The destruction of crops by animals is due to the fact that the fallow plots are not well managed and the livestock do not find the necessary nutrients to meet their needs. By harvesting crops' parts to meet the dietary needs of livestock, the farmer transfers part of the added value associated with crop production into animal and dairy production. On the other hand, animal wastes which are used as fertilizers constitue an intermediate consumption difficult to estimate. Renewing a plantation represents an economic, social and environmental cost. This inter-connectivity of activities within farms enables to question on the merits of agroecology systems: Is the opportunity cost associated with the extraction of crops for feedstock greater or less than the contribution of the use of that feedstock to the added value generated by the practice of animal breeding? Does the cost of maintaining fallow plots exceed the damage caused by livestock on the main crops? What direction should the farmer give to each plot: food, feed production and grassland? What is the optimum size of livestock that matches the resources and capacities available? This series of questions indicates the need to understand the farmer in his environment because the integration of activities makes it difficult to analyze singular value added.

Knowledge sharing between researchers, farmers, and other stakeholders allows the use of science-based analytical approaches and/or local knowledge in a systematic way and generated actionable knowledge to improve farm economic results while providing ecosystem services and various societal benefits. Consequently, an approach needs to be established to depart from linear thinking in order to model the complexity, to find the way of acknowledging lay, tacit and local knowledge and integrating social and natural sciences and to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders. Systems thinking as an abstract way to conceptualize how various world views and understandings can be connected provides the necessary bases for linking multiple sources of knowledge and some general concepts that help to reflect and structure trans- and interdisciplinary research. Such an approach favours an in-depth understanding of the tensions farmers face and ensures the development of appropriate decision making tools. The tools would enable stakeholders to achieve their economic goals while providing ecosystem services and various societal benefits. By putting the farmer at the heart of the system, several models can be developed:

- The single-agent system: this is a model that will allow the farmer to optimize the added value of his farm in the presence of various constraints.

- The multi-agent system: It is a system made up of a set of agents, located in a certain environment and interacting according to certain relationships. An agent is an entity characterized by the fact that it is, at least partially, autonomous. This system will optimize the added value of all farmers.

- To these models mentioned above, we should graft an environmental model so as to internalize the multifunctional aspect of the practice of agriculture. In the latter case, it would be a question of establishing equivalences between the farming operations, the behavior of the consequences of these operations in nature (the natural regulatory mechanisms in order to see the acceptable impacts) and the environmental impact (the CO2 emission equivalence for example). These equivalences would establish connectivity between the first two models and the environmental requirements.

From these models, guides for good practices in agriculture would emerge and allow each actor to self-control his practices in order to maximize added value while preserving the environment. These models would also make it possible to perceive the dangers that constitute a threat to the multifunctional nature of agriculture and to take control measures in order to be able to anticipate the risks.

dnpatrice2001

Sustainable intensification remains ill-defined and adding the level of agroecology to it only aggravate this problem.

Sustainable intensification offers an approach to evaluate and balance the environmental, economic and social objectives of agriculture, improving the efficient use of resources for agriculture with the goal of producing more on the same amount of land, but with reduced negative environmental and social impacts. However, SI does not articulate or privilege any particular vision or method of agricultural production. This concept of multiple production is perceived and weighted differently across actors/countries/regions and thus renders difficult the spread of the knowledge and the management harder to be regulated. A basic problem in many conceptualisations is their partial nature, originating from a disciplinary viewpoint, which obscures assessment of synergies between functions of agriculture.

Policy issue at stake when discussing sustainable intensification is that the expected outputs (increased yield per unit area, nutrients efficiency, provision of ecosystem services, optimized biodiversity friendly practices) of the system do not accrue automatically as inevitable outcomes of any type farming, but may vary widely based on farming practices, farm size, farm location and interactions between these variables. This leads to questions on policy incentives and regulations, their relation to SI goals of society, and the way in which the outcomes of policies are affected by the locality-specific aspects of farming. These questions play a role during policy design and the associated negociation process, as well as during monitoring and evaluation of implemented policies. During policy design, alternative policy options are assessed in terms of their contribution to goal achievement, and trade-offs between goals become topics of negociation. During this phase investigation of a wide array of potential policies is desirable to avoid the debate becoming locked in on narrow visions. During the phase of monitoring and evaluation, predictions are needed of the degree of goal achievement over policy planning horizon given the current state of the object of the policy.

Both during policy design and during monitoring and evaluation, indicators may be used to simplify, to quantify and to communicate consequences of actions. During both policy design and policy evaluation, quantification of effects may be useful to evaluate consequences of alternative options. Models that integrate disciplinary knowledge enable such quantitative assessment of alternatives. Consequently, integrative modelling approaches are used to well define sustainable intensification and to properly add the level of agroecology. They would enable to clearly describe its goals, practices, and market implementation.

The main task of integrative modelling approaches is combining multiple goals of agriculture and confronting these with current or potential performance of agricultural land-use systems at different spatial scales. Having set goals and defined indicators and system to be assessed, integrative models constitue the means to express the performance of the formulated systems in terms of the defined indicator set.

Model-based assessment of sustainable intensification encompasses five components which are interrelated through functional relations and learning loop:1) goal definition, 2) indicatif set, 3) system definition, 4) integrative models and 5) sustainable intensification assessment. Among these components, the fourth appears to be the most important because it enables the model-based assessment to give approxilately the same result when the representation of the system to be assessed changes without changing the value of the system. In fact, integrative models constitue the means to express the performance of the formulated systems in terms of the defined indicator set. These models may comprise qualitative sub-models or expert systems as well as quantitative models at different levels of complexity ranging from statistical or census data to statistical descriptive relations and mechanistic simulation models. The output of the model represents the sustainable intensification assessment of the case under consideration. The output may constitue the end point of the SI assessment. In view of the rather ill-defined nature of the notion and its role in negociations among actors, however it is more likely that the results feedback to the definition of indicator set or system, thus contributing to emergence of more refined specific description of sustainable intensification as part of a learning cycle. The output may even feedback to the goal definition, thus affecting the definition of sustainable intensification at a more fundamental level.

Prof Andrea Knierim (2006) developed the analytical framework to analyse and compare various integrative modelling approaches that were built in France, Germany and the Netherlands for the assessment of multifunctionality of agriculture. The results of the analysis revealed unexpectedly large differences between those countries: the nature of agroecological or bioeconomy relation used and targeted audience. Common elements were a focus on methodology development rather than answering questions of specific clients, limited attention for model evaluation and impact analysis, and an umbalanced attention for economic and abiotic environmental indicators at the expense of biotic, landscape and social indicators. None of the approaches specifically addressed multifunctionality of agriculture or referred consumers as intended users. Regarding the above-mentionned limitations, integrative modelling approaches need to be further developed before their use for the assessment of sustainable intensification and for the definition of a strong form of ecological modernisation.

1.     Filling gaps in knowledge concerning indicator systems, scaling issues and data availability

2.     Developing standardized data interfaces for models

3.     Extending Farm Accounting Data Networks to include biotic, landscape and social quantities

4.     Developing multi-agent approaches and multi-criteria generic algorithms combined with GIS that present acceptable rather than optimal solutions to stimulate discussion of alternatives

5.     Introducing systems thinking and systems practice as theoritical concepts and practices with the aim to support inter- and transdisciplinary teams and to integrate contributions from social and natural sciences

6.     Referring consumers as intended users of information generated by integrative modelling approaches.

To which extent do you think will this development help overcome the ill-defined nature of sustainable intensification? Adding social ecology will result in new goals, which in turn will affect system definition and indicators sets used to measure system performance. How can we add social ecology in integrative modelling approaches while reducing their complexity?