Brazil’s Cattle Sector Amidst Climate Transitions

Even in a world that limits global warming to below 2°C, government, consumer, and private sector responses to climate change, known as “climate transitions”, will materially change the financial future of the Brazilian cattle sector. Analysis of Brazil’s cattle sector shows that the risks posed by maintaining current production practices and business models are material for investors, producers and the sector’s entire value chain. Yet climate transitions also open significant new opportunities for producers and investors who stand to benefit from a projected 88 percent increase in agricultural investment by 2050

Brazil’s Soy Sector Amidst Climate Transitions

Even in a world that limits global warming to below 2° C, government, consumer, and private sector responses to climate change, known as “climate transitions”, will materially change the financial future of the Brazilian soy sector. Soy stakeholders that invest in improving the sustainability and efficiency of their operations, reducing the emission intensity of production, exploring emerging market segments and diversifying revenue streams could see significant opportunities emerge as climate transitions benefit this commodity’s outlook

A decentralized approach to model national and global food and land use systems

The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr−1 over the period 2020–2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities

Environmental and field characteristics associated with lameness in sheep: a study using a smartphone lameness app for data recording

Background Sheep lameness is a major concern among farmers and policymakers with significant impacts on animal welfare standards as well as financial and production performance. The present study attempts to identify the relative importance of environmental and farm-level management characteristics on sheep lameness. Method To address this objective, data were derived from the SPiLaMM project from 18 farms that used smartphone app to collect data, the British Geological Survey and the Meteorological Office over 2016–2018. Data were analysed using a multilevel Poisson regression model. Results Temperature and higher length of pasture had a positive relationship with lameness while concentration of Selenium in soil and flock size had a negative relationship with lameness. In addition, results showed lower lameness levels for the bedrock class mudstone, siltstone, limestone and sandstone in comparison to sandstone and finally, lambs and ewes younger than 1year old had lower levels of lameness than older ewes. Conclusion Findings of the present approach show the potential use of data collected via a smartphone app to study the epidemiology of disease. Furthermore, factors identified could be validated in intervention studies and generate data-driven disease predictive models.</p

Restoring nature at lower food production costs

Primary data for the present analysis was derived from open source domains and was compiled through a bottom up approach to provide a global coverage of financial information on costs of agricultural production for ten major crops. Data edit, processing and analysis was conducted with the use of the statistical software R and the package "dplyr"

Restoring nature at lower food production costs

Growing competition for land, water and energy call for global strategies ensuring affordable food production at minimum environmental impacts. Economic modelling studies suggest trade-off relationships between environmental sustainability and food prices. However, evidence based on empirical cost-functions supporting such trade-offs remains scarce at the global level. Here, based on cost engineering modelling, we show that optimised spatial allocation of 10 major crops, would reduce current costs of agricultural production by approximately 40% while improving environmental performance. Although production inputs per unit of output increase at local scales, a reduction of cultivated land of 50% overcompensates the slightly higher field-scale costs enabling improved overall cost-effectiveness. Our results suggest that long-run food prices are bound to continue to decrease under strong environmental policies. Policies supporting sustainability transitions in the land sector should focus on managing local barriers to the implementation of high-yield regenerative agricultural practices delivering multiple regional and global public goods

Global agricultural costing model

The agricultural costing model is a cost calculator that includes national-scale information on costs of production for ten major crops including, barley, groundnut, maize, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sunflower, and wheat, and works in combination to FABLE calculator. The present version of the costing inventory includes five cost items corresponding to costs for the production inputs of fertiliser, pesticides, labour, machinery and fuel. The current setting of the cost calculation is based on the integration of physical requirement per hectare for any given production input, the respective cost per unit of input and the cropland extent