Applying spatio-chemical analysis to grassland ecosystems for the illustration of chemoscapes and creation of healthscapes

Grasslands are heterogeneous landscapes composed of a diversity of herbaceous and shrub vegetation that varies not only taxonomically, but biochemically in terms of primary and secondary compounds. Plant Secondary Compounds (PSC) have specific nutritional, medicinal, and prophylactic properties, to which benefits depend upon dosage, type, arrangements, and concentration that changes between and within plants across time and space. The knowledge of the plant content of PSC and their distribution in grazing environments would therefore contribute to the design and creation of healthier foodscapes for ruminants; in other words, healthscapes. Geographic information systems (GIS) have been used extensively for landscape visualization and assessment, through several spatial analysis techniques applied for the creation of virtual maps to add valuable information to a particular environment. Given the knowledge of plants and their composition, GIS emerges as a readily available and low-cost tool to assess and evaluate the distribution of plants with beneficial PSC in large and heterogeneous foodscapes. We present and propose for the very first time, the application and use of GIS to determine the spatial distribution of PSC rich plants with nutraceutical properties to illustrate, visualize, and generate healthscapes for grazing ruminants. We present healthscape maps created using botanical composition analyses and advanced image classification methods to illustrate the distribution of plants regarding their PSC and nutraceutical properties. Such maps add an extra dimension and perspective to plant chemical composition, enabling graziers to visualize in space and time centers of nutrition and prophylactics or medicines, contributing to advanced grazing management decisions toward more productive, sustainable, and healthy grazing systems. The valuable information behind the mapped PSC advances the understanding of the nutritional ecology of grazing environments and foodscapes, introducing a new dimension to the holistic management of pastoral livestock production systems

Editorial: Grazing behavior and welfare of ruminants

The domestication and use of animals for our benefit entails responsibility for their quality of life (1). Animal welfare is a prerequisite for any ethical and sustainable animal production system to be socially defensible and acceptable (2). In nature, animals evolved in a changing environment and developed adaptive mechanisms to increase fitness (3). Cattle evolved in extensive grasslands and rangelands, in herds and families with complex social hierarchy and adapt to challenges posed by their environment through natural selection. Grazing animals face a number of challenges, including tick-borne diseases and lack of access to water and shade. Under human control, it is our responsibility to help animals to cope with such stressors and provide them a good life. This Research Topic aims to identify stressors present in pastoral husbandry systems; assess to the extent they affect health, welfare and production, and propose solutions to mitigate or overcome stressors

Is Grassfed Meat and Dairy Better for Human and Environmental Health?

The health of livestock, humans, and environments is tied to plant diversity—and associated phytochemical richness—across landscapes. Health is enhanced when livestock forage on phytochemically rich landscapes, is reduced when livestock forage on simple mixture or monoculture pastures or consume high-grain rations in feedlots, and is greatly reduced for people who eat highly processed diets. Circumstantial evidence supports the hypothesis that phytochemical richness of herbivore diets enhances biochemical richness of meat and dairy, which is linked with human and environmental health. Among many roles they play in health, phytochemicals in herbivore diets protect meat and dairy from protein oxidation and lipid peroxidation that cause low-grade systemic inflammation implicated in heart disease and cancer in humans. Yet, epidemiological and ecological studies critical of red meat consumption do not discriminate among meats from livestock fed high-grain rations as opposed to livestock foraging on landscapes of increasing phytochemical richness. The global shift away from phytochemically and biochemically rich wholesome foods to highly processed diets enabled 2.1 billion people to become overweight or obese and increased the incidence of type II diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Unimpeded, these trends will add to a projected substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) from producing food and clearing land by 2050. While agriculture contributes one quarter of GHGE, livestock can play a sizable role in climate mitigation. Of 80 ways to alleviate climate change, regenerative agriculture—managed grazing, silvopasture, tree intercropping, conservation agriculture, and farmland restoration—jointly rank number one as ways to sequester GHG. Mitigating the impacts of people in the Anthropocene can be enabled through diet to improve human and environmental health, but that will require profound changes in society. People will have to learn we are members of nature’s communities. What we do to them, we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them can we nurture ourselves

Editorial: Grazing in future multi-scapes: From thoughtscapes to landscapes, creating health from the ground up

More than half the land surface of the Earth is used for grazing (United Nations General Assembly, 2022), with Asia at 36% and Africa at 30% of the total. About 91% of global grass- and range-lands are unfenced with few boundaries and limited crop farming (Reid et al., 2014). The remaining grass- and range-lands are privately owned and used, with 13% in North America, 10% in Australia and New Zealand, 8% in South America, and 3% in Europe; all with a mix of more intensive grazing and cultivated land. No wonder why across the world's landscapes, grazing and browsing herbivores—both wild and livestock—(be they within a spatial and temporal pastoral context, whether they naturally graze or are grazed by farmers, ranchers, shepherds, and nomadic peoples—all termed pastoralists), fulfill essential roles in driving the composition, structure, and dynamics of pastoral ecosystem. The provision of ecosystem services, including social, economic, and cultural benefits to families, farms, and communities, is accordingly impacted (Gregorini, 2015)

Complexity, crash and collapse of chaos: Clues for designing sustainable systems, with focus on grassland-based systems

Terms such as system crash, collapse of chaos and complexity can help one understand change, also in biological, socio-economic and technical systems. These terms need, however, explanation for fruitful dialogue on design of sustainable systems. We start this paper on Grass Based (GB) systems, therefore, dwelling on these terms and notions as review for the insiders and to help interested ‘outsiders’. We also stress the need to use additional and/or new paradigms for understanding of the nature of nature. However, we show that many such ‘new’ paradigms were known for long time around the globe among philosophers and common men, giving reason to include quotes and examples from other cultures and eras. In the past few centuries, those paradigms have become hidden, perhaps, under impressive but short-term successes of more linear paradigms. Therefore, we list hang-ups on paradigms of those past few centuries. We then outline what is meant by ‘GB systems’, which exist in multiple forms/‘scapes’. Coping with such variation is perhaps the most central aspect of complexity. To help cope with this variation, the different (GB) systems can be arranged on spatial, temporal, and other scales in such a way that the arrangements form logical sequences (evolutions) of stable states and transitions of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). Together with other ways to handle complexity, we give examples of such arrangements to illustrate how one can (re-)imagine, (re-)cognize and manage initial chaotic behaviors and eventual ‘collapse’ of chaos into design and/or emergence of new systems. Then, we list known system behaviors, such as predator–prey cycles, adaptive cycles, lock-in, specialization and even tendency to higher (or lower) entropy. All this is needed to understand changes in management of evolving GB into multi-scapes. Integration of disciplines and paradigms indicates that a win-win is likely to be exception rather than rule. With the rules given in this paper, one can reset teaching, research, rural development, and policy agendas in GB-systems and other areas of life

Animal as the solution: Searching for environmentally friendly dairy cows

There is increasing societal concern surrounding the environmental externalities generated from ruminant production systems. Traditional responses to address these externalities have often been system-based. While these approaches have had promising results, they have served to view the animal as a problem that needs solving, rather than as a potential solution. This review attempts to answer the question: can we breed animals that are more environmentally friendly to address environmental outcomes and satisfy consumer demand? This was done by exploring the literature of examples where animals have been specifically bred to reduce their environmental impact. The use of milk urea nitrogen breeding values has been demonstrated as a tool allowing for selective breeding of dairy cows to reduce nitrogen losses. Low milk urea nitrogen breeding values have been documented to result in reduced urinary nitrogen concentrations per urination event, which ultimately reduces the level of nitrogen that will be lost from the system. The ability to breed for low methane emissions has also shown positive results, with several studies demonstrating the heritability and subsequent reductions in methane emissions via selective breeding programs. Several avenues also exist where animals can be selectively bred to increase the nutrient density of their final product, and thus help to address the growing demand for nutrient-dense food for a growing human population. Animal-based solutions are permanent, cumulative, and often more cost-effective than system-based approaches. With continuing research and interest in breeding for more positive environmental outcomes, the animal can now start to be viewed as a potential solution to many of the issues faced by ruminant production systems, rather than simply being seen as a problem

Pasture Chemoscapes and Their Ecological Services

Ruminant livestock-production systems are between a rock and a hard place; they are experiencing increasing societal pressure to reduce environmental impacts in a world that demands increased food supply. Recent improvements in the understanding of the nutritional ecology of livestock by scientists may help livestock producers respond to these seemingly contradictory demands. Forages are nutrition and pharmacy centers with primary (nutrients) and plant secondary compounds (PSC; pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals), which can provide multiple services for the proper functioning of agroecosystems. Legumes with lower contents of fiber and higher contents of nonstructural carbohydrates, coupled with different types and concentrations of PSC (e.g., condensed tannins, terpenes), create a diverse array of chemicals in the landscape (i.e., the “chemoscape”) with the potential to enhance livestock nutrition, health and welfare relative to foodscapes dominated by grasses and other conventional feeds. These PSC-containing plants may reduce methane emissions and nitrogen (N) excretion from animals while increasing animal growth rate compared with swards dominated by grasses, and provide meat quality that appeals to consumers. Condensed tannins from sainfoin and saponins from alfalfa and manure of cattle consuming these forages also reduce N mobilization in soils, reduce nutrient leaching, and increase plant-available N stores for future use. The challenge for future pastoral production systems is to design multifunctional spatiotemporal arrangements of forages with “ideal” chemical diversity for specific ecoregions, aiming to achieve sustainability while increasing production goals and improving ecosystem services. Thus, the objective of this review is to stimulate the quest for chemically and taxonomically diverse pastoral feeding systems that optimize overall productivity; reduce environmental impacts; and enhance livestock, soil, and human health

A review on the effects of part-time grazing herbaceous pastures on feeding behaviour and intake of cattle, sheep and horses

Part-time grazing (PTG) is the grazing technique based on the time-restricted access to pasture of farmed herbivores, usually supplemented indoors. This review evaluates the effects of the duration of access to pasture on the functional responses of grazing time and herbage intake rate in cattle, sheep and horses and the implications of these responses on diet selection, diet digestibility, energy expenditure, animal welfare, the performance of ruminants and the quality of their products (milk and meat). Ruminants with restricted access time to pasture display compensatory behaviour through increased intake rate, achieving similar levels of intake and performance compared with 24 h-grazing ruminants, particularly if access time is in the range 6-8 h/d. This can depend on the reduction of locomotion energy expenditure, and, sometimes, on the selection of a better quality diet than that on offer. Nevertheless, due to lower ingestive fibre trituration, fibre digestibility could be reduced, particularly with access time <4 h/d. Moreover, milk content of FA regarded as beneficial for consumers' health, such as n-3 PUFA and rumenic acid, is usually higher in PTG than stall-fed ruminants, with a minimum access to grass pasture of 6 h/d in cows supplemented with total mixed rations or 4 h/d in sheep supplemented with concentrate and hay. Timing the grazing session of ruminants in the afternoon and evening hours is a good strategy to match pasture quality and animal attitude to forage intensively and efficiently, favouring intake, performance and produce quality. Horses show on average lower intake rates scaled to metabolic weight than ruminants, probably due to their lower energy requirements but also for the need to spend part of the time outdoor performing physical activity and social behavior. Therefore, they probably need longer access time than ruminants. However, access should be time restricted or avoided during periods of the year and day hours (from midday to evening) when herbage content of non structural carbohydrates (sum of starch and water soluble carbohydrates) is high (> 15 % DM) since it can be conducive to equine metabolic syndrome and laminitis. In general, PTG can improve ruminant and horse welfare as compared with stall-feeding with reference to appropriate behavior and freedom from some pathologies, although further research is needed to quantify these effects on a wider range of animal species and welfare indicators

Livestock in evolving foodscapes and thoughtscapes

Humanity’s main societal and epistemic transitions also mirror changes in its approach to the food system. This particularly holds true for human–animal interactions and the consumption of animal source foods (red meat especially, and to a lesser degree dairy, eggs, poultry, and fish). Hunter-gathering has been by far the longest prevailing form of human sustenance, followed by a diffuse transition to crop agriculture and animal husbandry. This transition eventually stabilized as a state-controlled model based on the domestication of plants, animals, and humans. A shift to a post-domestic paradigm was initiated during the 19th century in the urbanizing populations of the Anglosphere, which was characterized by the rise of agri-food corporations, an increased meat supply, and a disconnect of most of its population from the food chain. While this has improved undernutrition, various global threats have been emerging in parallel. The latter include, among others, a public health crisis, climate change, pandemics, and societal class anxieties. This state of affairs is an unstable one, setting the conditions of possibility for a new episteme that may evolve beyond mere adjustments within the business-as-usual model. At least two disruptive scenarios have been described in current food discourses, both by scientists and mass media. Brought to its extreme, the first scenario relates to the radical abolishment of livestock, rewilding, a ‘plants-only’ diet, and vegan ideology. A second option consists of a holistic approach to animal husbandry, involving more harmonic and richer types of human–animal–land interactions. We argue that – instead of reactive pleas for less or none – future thoughtscapes should emphasize ‘more of the better.

Transformation of animal agriculture should be evidence-driven and respectful of livestock’s benefits and contextual aspects

Non peer reviewe