Opportunities for biodiversity conservation
in cattle production systems
Celia A. Harvey
Professor and Research Scientist
Department of Agriculture and Agroforestry
Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Ensenañza (CATIE)
Across the world, cattle production systems have had a huge negative impact on local ecosystems and their biodiversity. Cattle production systems currently cover 3,459.8 million hectares globally (26% of the world’s land area) and affect a diverse suite of ecosystems, ranging from the arid tropics to the temperate highlands. A wide array of environmental problems are associated with cattle production, including deforestation and fragmentation of natural vegetation, contamination of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems by animal waste, land degradation, soil erosion, competition with native wildlife, and the production of greenhouse gases. As a result, cattle production often has a negative impact on biodiversity, reducing species richness, changing the composition of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and compromising ecosystem health. The impact of cattle production on biodiversity, however, varies across different sites and regions, and depends on a variety of factors such as the characteristics of the ecosystem, the degree to which native vegetation is retained within the agricultural landscape, the type of cattle production system (grazing, mixed or industrial), the location of cattle operations within the landscape, and cattle and pasture management practices, among others. It is possible to diminish the impact of cattle production on native ecosystems through the adoption of best management approaches that improve pasture and cattle management practices, promote better waste management, and strategically locate cattle production system within agricultural landscapes; however few of these approaches have been widely adopted. Of these approaches, strategies to conserve biodiversity within grazing systems (such as the adoption of silvopastoril systems) are of particular importance, given the large areas of land currently devoted to this system.
In this talk, I review the impact of cattle production
systems on biodiversity conservation and highlight general opportunities for
reducing the impact of cattle production systems on natural ecosystems. In
addition, I use a case study from