How cows compete with human nutrition - assessing feed-food and land use competition of Swiss dairy production.

Abstract

Ruminants are able to convert feed sources not directly usable by humans into valuable human-edible food. If, however, ruminants are fed with feedstuff that could have been consumed directly as food by humans (i.e. cereals), or which were produced on land that could be used to grow arable crops for direct human consumption, competition arises between feed production for ruminants and food production for humans. We developed and applied two different methods to assess feed-food and landuse competition on Swiss dairy farms. Depending on the amount and type of concentrate used, limited feed-food competition was found. All farms showed a larger edible output (in terms of milk and meat) than input (in terms of feedstuffs). Contrastingly, strong competition for land-use was found, as most farms (depending on the proportion of arable land) could have produced more edible energy and protein, if the land had been used instead for direct human food production