Commission on Livestock Farming Systems (L)

President Michael Lee University of Bristol and Rothamsted Research UK michael.lee@rothamsted.ac.uk

Vice-President Monika Zehetmeier Bavarian State Research Center, Institute for Agricultural Economics monika.zehetmeier@gmx.de Secretaries Tommy Boland (Ireland) Vincent Thenard (France) R. Ripoll-Bosch                       (The Netherlands) Industry Representative Alfredo J. Escribano (Spain)   Young Scientist Maria Karatzia (Greece)

LFS commission envision livestock farming systems in its broadest sense, from the individual farm, to the local ecosystem, and to communities. LFS goal is to understand and resolve sustainability issues of livestock farming.

The focus is a holistic view of the system performance, not least because optimizing individual parts tends to have undesirable side-effects elsewhere in the system and therefore tends to come at cost of the performance of the overall system. With holistic management, the aim is to achieve productivity through synergy – through building wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

A systems approach gives us the tools to explore the interconnections within a livestock farm and between farming and other aspects of our environment. These include concepts that are fundamental when addressing sustainability in livestock farming systems: ecosystem services, resilience, rural development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, health and well-being of people as well as health, welfare and robustness of soil, plants, animals and ecosystems.

Farming systems researchers typically study interactions at the

• Farm level: interactions between cropping, grassland management and animal husbandry, between on- and off- farm work, between technologies, agro-ecosystems and production economics
• Territorial level: interactions between production methods, cultural landscapes, economic incentives and farm diversity, farmers and other rural actors
• Chain level: interactions between farm and other actors along the food chain

The bundle of methods used reaches from whole farm simulation and optimization models, life cycle analysis, landscape modelling, participatory approaches, experimental research and all approaches that aim to explore interconnections at farm, regional and chain level.

Last but not least, a systems approach implies interdisciplinary efforts in research. This requires not only the input of researchers from various disciplines, but also farmers, farmworkers, consumers and policymakers.