Challenges
The livestock industries are continually under pressure to proactively embrace and incorporate sustainability drivers into their systems and forward improvement plans. These sectors need to maintain and increase profitability by responding to changing market conditions while simultaneously contributing to Scottish Government commitments on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and biodiversity. Scotland’s commitment aims to reduce baseline GHG emissions by 75% by 2030 and transition to net zero by 2045. An update to the Scottish climate change plan has accelerated the drive to net zero.
Local and global land use is under increasing pressure and livestock systems, that exist as part of landscape and food systems, need to consider what livestock futures are. The future sustainability of the Scottish livestock industry relies on farmers being able to respond to key challenges and threats - losses in efficiency and the resilience are critical components. This should not only think of resilience and efficiency of the individual animal, or the farming system as currently exists, but also how social, policy and environmental drivers may change the requirements we have of our livestock sector. We need to prioritise livestock futures and routes of improvement to achieve farm-level resilience and efficiency. This will help to address several societal challenges:
- Ensuring food security
- Managing natural resources in a sustainable way
- Mitigating and adapting to climate change
- Creating jobs and maintaining competitiveness
Questions
- How should we develop a data-led livestock system?
- How should livestock systems accommodate new farming landscapes?
Solutions
In addressing the current and future fit of our livestock in the changing landscape, this project is modelling scenarios of alternative livestock futures for Scotland which are being co-created with stakeholders.
Animal and system lifetime performance metrics and trajectories
We are developing metrics for quantifying animal and socio-economic and physical parameters in different time states. From this, we are creating animal lifetime trajectory routes nested within key system types. These are being used to identify gaps in efficiencies and resilience of livestock within current Scottish farming systems.
Modelling tools to predict outcomes of possible future scenarios
Models are being developed that allow representation over time of the herd/system within a local production environment. These models are also allowing farmers and advisors to test the economic value and herd durability consequences of adjusting a range of improvement trajectories (e.g., breeding and management strategies) according to alternative production environments and scenarios. We are assessing different farming systems regarding environmental, social, and economic sustainability aspects in future scenarios, including the consequences of climate change.
Identifying livestock futures and improvement routes to get there
We are engaging key stakeholders from the cattle sector to assist us to scope out the key “challenges” that livestock improvement has a potential role in solving. Feedback from our stakeholders is essential for the tool design, and to influence the progress and potential directions of this project.
Project Partners
Progress
Progress has been made with regards to two milestones important to the firs work package of the project, this work package focuses on being able to model animal and system lifetime performance and trajectories. The first of these milestones are to build a database of key performance metrics in Scottish beef and dairy animals across their life course and their systems. For this we have been able to collate public and private industry data sources to provide summary statistics for beef and dairy efficient metrics across life course. Future work will focus on integrating these to model animal and system production efficiency trajectories. The second milestone focuses on the current and future distribution of animal life course trajectories and system types to support Scottish livestock production. For this milestone we were able to build on a newly collated beef production dataset and have been able to show how industry available data can be combined with national weather and climate scenarios data to model climate/weather impacts on lifetime beef efficiency. These first steps help to demonstrate how the data can be used to understand the challenges being faced by the livestock-based industries and to identify real solutions to current and future challenges, including climate change impacts as well as the consequences of the requirements to reduce the environmental impact of our livestock production industries.
The overarching aim of this project is to breed climate resilient cattle that is an important strategy to mitigate the effects of climate change. Resilience of beef cattle is less well understood compared to dairy, especially in temperate climates. Here we aim to compare beef cattle resilience to climate, both for average weather but also extreme weather events. Linear models were used to analyse the chosen traits in over 1.7 million UK records with resilience being estimated using regression coefficients for interactions between breed type and weather parameters. Results show variation for resilience to climate between breeds with British breeds showing the greatest resilience. Our results suggest an increase in heat waves by 1 per 100 days of life would reduce carcass wights of dairy and continental animals by about 150 g but increase that of British breed animals by about 360 g.
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