To fulfill the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is useful to understand whether and how specific agricultural interventions improve human health, educational opportunity, and food security. In sub-Saharan Africa, 75% of the population is engaged in small-scale farming, and 80% of these households keep livestock, which represent a critical asset and provide protection aga...

Plant cell death occurring as a result of adverse environmental conditions is known to limit crop production. It is less well recognized that plant cell death processes can also contribute to the poor environmental footprint of ruminant livestock production. Although the forage cells ingested by grazing ruminant herbivores will ultimately die, the lack of oxygen, elevated temperature, and chall...

What is the future for livestock agriculture in the world? Consumers have concerns about sustainability but many widely used livestock production methods do not satisfy consumers' requirements for a sustainable system. However, production can be sustainable, occurring in environments that: supply the needs of the animals resulting in good welfare, allow coexistence with a wide diversity of orga...

Over the past decade, the Dutch Government has increasingly emphasised the need for integral solutions to sustainability problems in the livestock production sector. This has led to the adoption of research approaches in line with Transition Management and system innovation that were developed in other domains. In 2008, the government set further policy targets of 5% and 100% sustainable livest...

Climate change is expected to have direct and indirect impacts on African livestock. Direct impacts include increased ambient temperature, floods and droughts. Indirect impacts are the result of reduced availability of water and forage and changes in the environment that promote the spread of contagious diseases through increased contact between animals, or increased survival or availability of...

Cities are the most dramatic manifestations of human activities on the surface of the earth. These human-dominated organisms—i.e., cities—degrade natural habitats, simplify species composition, disrupt hydrological systems, and modify energy flow and nutrient cycling. Today, these consequential impacts of human activities, originated from population increase, rapid urbanization, high private mo...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that the projected massive global increase in demand for livestock products will continue for several decades. According to Delgado et al. (1999), it is appropriate to term the course of these events a " Livestock Revolution, " which, as opposed to the Green Revolution, is driven by demand. While more precise production techno...

Patrik Waldmann, Gábor Mészáros*, Birgit Gredler, Christian Fuerst and Johann Sölkner 1 Division of Livestock Sciences, Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria 2 Division of Statistics, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden 3 Qualitas AG, Zug, Switzerland 4 ZuchtData EDV-...

Livestock manures are an important resource in sustainable and organic crop production. This publication addresses the problems and challenges of using both raw and composted manures and discusses some of the solutions. It also deals with guano, a similar material. Manures for Organic