Individual pastures on livestock farms yield surprisingly dissimilar benefits to a farm's overall agricultural income, and those differences are most likely attributable to the varying levels of "soil health" provided by its grazing livestock, reveals a study published today.
The study, produced by an interdisciplinary team of 13 scientists and two PhD students from Rothamsted Research, evaluates how efficiently nutrients are used on a livestock farm, on a field-by-field basis for the first time, and links soil health to animal growth.
The team has developed a method to derive the contribution of individual fields to an animal's growth and, in the process, has opened up the possibility of using field-scale metrics as indicators of animal performance and agricultural productivity. The findings appear in the journal Animal.
"The prospect that commercial livestock producers could improve their productivity by purely changing rotational patterns is exciting," says Taro Takahashi, an agricultural economist at Rothamsted's North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP) in Devon, who led the study.
"Unlike many alternative technologies, this will not require any capital investment," adds Takahashi, who is also Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Livestock Systems and Food Security at the Bristol Veterinary School of the University of Bristol.
The majority of livestock farms in the UK operate rotational grazing, which involves moving animals from one field to another. While this practice supplies more fresh forage to animals throughout the season, it makes farming systems more difficult to monitor and optimise.
The problem has been the difficulty of linking an animal's performance to field measurements, such as soil health, because animals spend only a fraction of time in each field, which is also used to produce silage for winter. Under such complexity, collating required information manually was almost infeasible. The latest method provides a shortcut.
The NWFP team found that animal performance on individual fields was positively associated with the level of soil organic carbon, a common measure of "soil health" for sustainable farming. The team also discovered that fields grazed more intensively had healthier soils and were less prone to water and nutrient losses.
"Without our unique experimental design to separate hydrological flows from individual grazing fields, you couldn't accurately quantify any nutrients being lost as the majority would be dissolved in water," notes Paul Harris, one of the study's authors and the Principal Investigator at North Wyke, which consists of three instrumented farms over 63 hectares.
With the UK preparing to leave the EU, the new study comes as Rothamsted increases its efforts to contribute to the creation of a well-designed food supply chain, both through enhanced ecosystem services and reduced environmental impacts.
"The correlation between soil health and animal performance is a major finding that confirms the huge amount of anecdotal evidence linking soil parameters and liveweight gain," says Michael Lee, Head of the Department of Sustainable Agriculture Sciences at North Wyke.
"This study illustrates the multifaceted interactions between soil health, ecological surroundings and grazing animals that are so often overlooked in favour of more simplistic narratives," adds Lee, who is also Professor of Sustainable Livestock Systems at Bristol Veterinary School.
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NWFP is a UK National Capability, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council; its facility and datasets are open to all researchers. This study was carried out as part of Soil to Nutrition, one of Rothamsted's five Institute Strategic Programmes, also supported by the BBSRC.
NOTES TO EDITORS Publication:
Takahashi et al., 2018, Animal: Roles of instrumented farm-scale trials in trade-off assessments of pasture-based ruminant production systems DOI: 10.1017/S1751731118000502 [link live after publication; for embargoed copies, contact bill.oneill@rothamsted.ac.uk]
Rothamsted Research contacts:
Taro Takahashi, the paper's corresponding author
Tel: +44 (0) 1837 883 558 (Rothamsted - North Wyke)
Tel: +44 (0) 117 903 4400 (Bristol Veterinary School)
Email: taro.takahashi@rothamsted.ac.uk
Michael Lee, Head of Sustainable Agriculture Sciences Department, North Wyke
Tel: +44 (0) 1837 883 578 (Rothamsted - North Wyke)
Tel: +44 (0) 117 331 9308 (Bristol Veterinary School)
Email: michael.lee@rothamsted.ac.uk
Susan Watts, Head of Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 1582 938 109
Mob: +44 (0) 7964 832 719
E-mail: susan.watts@rothamsted.ac.uk
About Rothamsted Research
Rothamsted Research is the longest-running agricultural research institute in the world. We work from gene to field with a proud history of ground-breaking discoveries, from crop treatment to crop protection, from statistical interpretation to soils management. Our founders, in 1843, were the pioneers of modern agriculture, and we are known for our imaginative science and our collaborative influence on fresh thinking and farming practices.
Through independent science and innovation, we make significant contributions to improving agri-food systems in the UK and internationally. In terms of the institute's economic contribution, the cumulative impact of our work in the UK was calculated to exceed £3000 million a year in 2015 (Rothamsted Research and the Value of Excellence: A synthesis of the available evidence, by Séan Rickard). Our strength lies in our systems approach, which combines science and strategic research, interdisciplinary teams and partnerships.
Rothamsted is also home to three unique resources. These National Capabilities are open to researchers from all over the world: The Long-Term Experiments, Rothamsted Insect Survey and the North Wyke Farm Platform.
We are strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), with additional support from other national and international funding streams, and from industry. We are also supported by the Lawes Agricultural Trust (LAT).
For more information, visit https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/; Twitter @Rothamsted
About BBSRC
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is part of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body funded by a grant-in-aid from the UK government.
BBSRC invests in world-class bioscience research and training on behalf of the UK public. Our aim is to further scientific knowledge, to promote economic growth, wealth and job creation and to improve quality of life in the UK and beyond.
Funded by government, BBSRC invested £469 million in world-class bioscience in 2016-17. We support research and training in universities and strategically funded institutes. BBSRC research and the people we fund are helping society to meet major challenges, including food security, green energy and healthier, longer lives. Our investments underpin important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.
About LAT
The Lawes Agricultural Trust, established in 1889 by Sir John Bennet Lawes, supports Rothamsted Research's national and international agricultural science through the provision of land, facilities and funding. LAT, a charitable trust, owns the estates at Harpenden and Broom's Barn, including many of the buildings used by Rothamsted Research. LAT provides an annual research grant to the Director, accommodation for nearly 200 people, and support for fellowships for young scientists from developing countries. LAT also makes capital grants to help modernise facilities at Rothamsted, or invests in new buildings.
Journal
animal