The role of grassland based production system for sustainable protein production

Jean-Louis Peyraud (1)

1 PEGASE - Physiologie, Environnement et Génétique pour l'Animal et les Systèmes d'Elevage [Rennes]

Ruminant production systems are under pressure for their methane emission, inefficient use of land and a recurring idea assuming they consume far more plant proteins than they produce in the form of animal protein. However feed-food competition does in fact concern those proteins of plant origin that are consumable by human but are actually consumed by animals and ruminants are able to produce products of high nutritive value from grassland and marginal area that cannot be used for crop production. In addition grassland provides many environmental services. In the last decades the intensification of ruminant production system, and particularly those of dairy systems, have increased protein production per ha of land use but this occurs thanks to an increased use of concentrate which contains edible protein and at the expense of grassland acreage. Therefore the interest of this evolution for the contribution of ruminants to food security may be questioned. Feeding animals mainly from non-edible resources can be seen as a conceptually interesting issue from a global food security point of view. After showing that the decrease in European grassland acreage was closely linked to the intensification of dairy systems and the associated reduction of the number of cows, the paper describes protein production for various ruminant production systems and demonstrates that grassland based ruminant production systems are most often much more efficient than concentrate based systems for procuring proteins. In addition an increased use of grassland for ruminant production could also bring positive responses to societal demand for more natural practices and could contribute to maintaining farmer incomes in a context of price volatility. The challenge might be to increase productivity of grassland based system using sustainable intensification of forage production, well suited animals and grazing management.

Mots clés: Edible protein; Efficiency; Food security; Land utilisation; grassland; land equivalent ratio; competitive feeding; grazing; protein

Mots clés: protéine; compétition alimentaire; pâturage; ruminant; prairie; securité alimentaire; utilisation des terres; système d'élevage durable; production herbagère; efficience

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Jean-Louis Peyraud. The role of grassland based production system for sustainable protein production. 54. Annual meeting of the brazilian society of animal science, Jul 2017, Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. ⟨hal-01591147⟩