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Agronomy
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Fertilizer Management in Integrated Crop-Livestock System for a Sustainable Agriculture...
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Fertilizer Management in Integrated Crop-Livestock System for a Sustainable Agriculture Production

A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Farming Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 3791

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Laíse Da Silveira Pontes

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Instituto de Desenvolvimento Rural do Paraná – IAPAR-EMATER, Av. Euzébio de Queirós, s/n°, CP 129, Ponta Grossa CEP 84001-970, PR, Brazil
Interests: integrated crop-livestock systems; agroforestry systems; grassland management; forage species
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Tangriani Simioni Assmann

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Federal Technological University of Paraná, Pato Branco 85503390, Paraná, Brazil
Interests: integrated crop-livestock systems; nitrogen; nutrient cycling; system fertilization
Dr. Gilles Lemaire

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Honorary Director of Research (retired) INRAE, 86500 Lusignan, France
Interests: grassland and crop ecophysiology; crop mineral nutrition and fertilization; nitrogen–water interactions; grazing ecology; integrated crop livestock systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the years, the intensification and simplification of agriculture has led to negative impacts on the environment, such as greenhouse gas emissions, water quality degradation, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and land degradation. These environmental problems are mainly due to excessively high decoupling between carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus and their associated geochemical cycles within intensified agro-ecosystems due to fertilizer management. Hence, agriculture is facing an ever-greatest challenge: how to continue to increase production for food security and, at the same time, protect and restore the environment? In this respect, recoupling C–N–P cycles by increasing spatial and temporal diversity within agro-ecosystems through encouraging the development of integrated crop-livestock systems, instead of monocultures and intensive livestock production separately, should allow reconciling agriculture production with sufficient preservation of the environmental quality.

The objectives of this Special Issue are to provide knowledge on the different ecological services associated with integrated crop-livestock systems in contrast to simplified and separated crop and livestock production, to determine the socioeconomic conditions facilitating their introduction at different scales (farm, landscape, region, etc.), and to analyze crop/animal production management in these more complex systems. Integrated fertilization management within the frame of C, N, P coupling analysis for solving the trade-off between production and environment quality should be a recurrent theme.

Dr. Laíse Da Silveira Pontes
Dr. Tangriani Simioni Assmann
Dr. Gilles Lemaire
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • animal production
  • crop production
  • integrated crop-livestock systems
  • mixed systems
  • nutrient cycling
  • resource-use efficiency
  • soil quality
  • sustainable intensification
  • system fertilization

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

23 pages, 3499 KiB  
Review
Domestic Herbivores, the Crucial Trophic Level for Sustainable Agriculture: Avenues for Reconnecting Livestock to Cropping Systems
by Gilles Lemaire, Josette Garnier, Laíse da Silveira Pontes, Paulo César de Faccio Carvalho, Gilles Billen and Tangriani Simioni Assmann
Agronomy 2023, 13(4), 982; https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13040982 - 26 Mar 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3162
Abstract
Domestic herbivores have been closely associated with the historical evolution and development of agriculture systems worldwide as a complementary system for providing milk, meat, wool, leather, and animal power. However, their major role was to enhance and maintain agricultural soil fertility through the [...] Read more.
Domestic herbivores have been closely associated with the historical evolution and development of agriculture systems worldwide as a complementary system for providing milk, meat, wool, leather, and animal power. However, their major role was to enhance and maintain agricultural soil fertility through the recycling of nutrients. In turn, cereal production increased, enabling to feed a progressively increasing human population living in expanding urban areas. Further, digestion of organic matter through the rumen microbiome can also be viewed as enhancing the soil microbiome activity. In particular, when animal droppings are deposited directly in grazing areas or applied to fields as manure, the mineralization–immobilization turnover determines the availability of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients in the plant rhizosphere. Recently, this close coupling between livestock production and cereal cropping systems has been disrupted as a consequence of the tremendous use of industrial mineral fertilizers. The intensification of production within these separate and disconnected systems has resulted in huge emissions of nitrogen (N) to the environment and a dramatic deterioration in the quality of soil, air, and ground- and surface water. Consequently, to reduce drastically the dependency of modern and intensified agriculture on the massive use of N and phosphorus (P) fertilizers, we argue that a close reconnection at the local scale, of herbivore livestock production systems with cereal-based cropping systems, would help farmers to maintain and recover the fertility of their soils. This would result in more diverse agricultural landscapes including, besides cereals, grasslands as well as forage and grain crops with a higher proportion of legume species. We developed two examples showing such a beneficial reconnection through (i) an agro-ecological scenario with profound agricultural structural changes on a European scale, and (ii) typical Brazilian integrated crop–livestock systems (ICLS). On the whole, despite domestic herbivores emit methane (CH4), an important greenhouse gas, they participate to nutrient recycling, which can be viewed as a solution to maintaining long-term soil fertility in agro-ecosystems; at a moderate stocking density, ecosystem services provided by ruminants would be greater than the adverse effect of greenhouse gas (GHG). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Fertilizer Management in Integrated Crop-Livestock System for a Sustainable Agriculture Production)
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