INTEGRITY aims to evaluate alternative management of mixed crop-ruminant livestock systems to increase the potential increment of Carbon and Nutrient Circularity in diverse agro-climatic regions. Nine countries from three continents (America, Europe, and Oceania) are involved in this proposal. Different degrees of integration between the crops and livestock components of a system may have advantages or disadvantages, so trade-offs among economic (productivity, efficiency), environmental (nutrient cycling, soil health, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions), and social (work arduousness and organization, household networks) indicators will be identified. Gaps in knowledge regarding impacts of the integration need to be addressed to fully understand the mechanisms that reduce GHG emissions and/or increase soil C sequestration and nutrients (i.e. C, N) use efficiency in mixed production systems; and which would be the impact of proposed interventions with a broader and holistic perspective. These interventions will be specifically designed for each situation and will be evaluated experimentally to quantify their impact, not only through direct and specific effects but also in a broad sense addressing the circularity within the agricultural systems by different modeling tools. Standardized evaluation approaches and procedures across the different partners will allow direct comparison of the relative impact of new management alternatives. Stakeholders’ involvement through the process will certainly help to focus on applicable new practices and facilitate their adoption by farmers. The conformed Low Carbon Livestock - Research Network, a regional platform involving countries from America and Europe created in 2020 and supported by the GRA, will strengthen the capacity-building opportunities for young researchers and enhance the result dissemination platform. Proposed activities within this project will be organized in 5 Work Packages (WP). The WP1 will investigate different management practices at diverse agricultural systems to enhance nutrient circularity, production efficiency, and reduce C footprint; WP2 aims to identify the potential improvement of C footprint by increasing the inclusion of by-products in ruminants feeding programs; WP3 will evaluate the management of carbon circularity and climate change mitigation and adaptation in mixed crop-ruminant livestock systems through system approach assessment and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (i.e. design of digital twins of farms based on combining sensor data and modeling that can help the decision-making process of stakeholders on the production chain of different mixed production systems). Also, this WP includes agent-based modeling to understand the decision-making process and other emergent properties of mixed crop-livestock production systems; WP4 will involve engagement with stakeholders, training, communication, and dissemination; WP5 project coordination. A particular characteristic of this proposal is the range of diverse production systems with different agro-climatic and socio-cultural characteristics that will allow observing differential responses of enhanced resource use efficiency and optimize nutrient circularity with the integration of the two systems components at different locations. This project involves cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary cooperation, which will be supported by the consortium’s complementary scientific skills, and reinforce and expand a history of mutual cooperative research where new partners will be involved.

Towards Sustainable And Resilent Agriculture (TSARA) investigates means to support and develop pathways to delivering to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and targets. The UN SDGs replace the Millennium Goals for the period 2015-2030 and most heads of UN governments are expected to sign up to the SD agenda at the end of September 2015. TSARA consists of five scientific and one management Work Packages (WP). WP 1 classifies EU agricultural land-use and management into major types. WP 2 suggests levels of delivery to SDGs and their associated targets and indicators – for instance a 30% reduction in GHG emissions. WP 3 researches and develops models and collects the baseline data needed to run those models in order to forecast the outputs and wider impacts of agriculture over the next 15 years (for the SDGs) and up to 2050 for FACCE-JPI. This WP also sets up the key operational framework for use in TSARA: a series of tables known as dashboards that record the changes in indicators of sustainable agriculture in the EU needed to achieve the desired targets for SDGs by 2030. The approach is known as ‘backcasting’ and consists of setting out the expected or desired state of agriculture in 2030 and then taking backward steps to see what conditions would have to be like in 2025, then 2020 and then 2015(6) in order to achieve this state. Having set up the current (baseline) and desired states of EU agriculture in WP3, WP4 actually runs these analyses, populating the tables with a number of routes through the intermediate years to the targets. In this way, we develop a range of alternative pathways and provide options in support of the setting and pursuit of ambitious levels of national and transnational delivery in policy to the SDGs and targets. WP4 also investigates tradeoffs between the delivery to different goals as well as social and political impediments along the way. TSARA thus iterates pathways to goals and targets as well as helping with the setting of ambitious levels of delivery to those targets. As well as detailed studies in the three key EU nations in TSARA (i) – France, the Netherlands and the UK – the project will investigate (ii) EU-wide agriculture more broadly, support detailed case studies in (iii) Italy and Poland if additional funds can be secured and liaise with ongoing work in (iv) China, Uruguay and Tanzania that is adopting the same backcasting approach to delivery to the SDGs. WP5 engages with stakeholders to understand their concerns and reservations about pathways and targets so as to ensure buy-in at all levels of society with the eventual project outputs, which will be a series of strategies to deliver challenging improvements in the sustainability of EU agricultural practice.

The widespread reintroduction of crops and livestock could make a major contribution to the development of the wider EU circular (agricultural) economy and contribute to sustainable growth, through the more effective recycling of materials and resources, the minimization of waste, and a reduction in external supplies of feed and synthetic fertilizers, with potential biodiversity, environmental and soil health benefits. However, this comes with significant challenges, including the potential for enhanced GHG emissions, particularly methane emissions, from enteric fermentation, land degradation due to over grazing and water pollution as well as the need to effectively substitute all/most inorganic fertilizers with organic manures. Organic amendments applied to land could conversely result in enhanced GHG emissions, particular nitrous oxide emissions, unless these are managed appropriately and the necessity to store large amounts of organic manures/wastes may also be problematic, given their links to environmental pollution and GHG emissions. Additional complications could arise due to associated modifications in land use, including a shift from a grass-based to a forage/alternative crop-based diet, altered grazing practices and increased competition between food and animal feed or the use of biogas or bioenergy crops. Another key issue is the economic consequences of reintroducing livestock and whether the necessary incentives are available for them to be taken up by farmers. Whilst mixed farming systems were previously common and economically viable, new developments will require them to be matched with current production and market conditions and the availability of suitable value chains and business models to ensure their long-term viability. To address this, we have assembled a multi-actor inter-disciplinary research team, with wide ranging expertise in the whole animal-crop supply chain and its environmental impact, which will take a holistic approach to the sustainable reintegration of livestock and cropping systems. Particular attention will be directed at livestock type and management (WP2), the appropriate use and storage of manures (WP2), crop choice, including direct grazing of crops and/or their residues, the use of afforestation/agroforestry (WP4) as an alternative grazing option and to increase soil carbon, as well as and how this information can be integrated into decision support tools for identifying the best options for farmers (WP5). Importantly, we will assess the use of alternative livestock dietary feed sources that have the potential to reduce enteric methane production coupled with novel investigations on a mechanistic asessment of the ability of soils to oxidise methane, and how this information can be utilized to improve whole farm methane budgets. Critical to this approach is an ability to monitor and validate any management options (WP6) on the net GHG budgets and their economic consequences (WP7), as well as the effective dissemination of the results for practical implementation by policy makers, stakeholders, farmers and other end users (WP8). Stakeholder engagement will play an important role in realising the benefits of any modifications that are identified to both increase circularity whilst also minimizing the environmental footprint of mixed farming systems. All this will feed into a project-specific data repository (WP1) and, together with the identification of management options that avoid the negative impacts of livestock integration, will have benefits beyond the lifetime of the project.

More than 30% of the Earth’s total land mass is used for grazing livestock production, mainly by ruminant animals. The evolutionary adaptation of the ruminant’s ability to convert pasture to animal products such as meat, milk, and fibre may have been successfully harnessed, but ruminant production has an unwanted byproduct of an important greenhouse gas (GHG), methane. The aim of the project is to combine international scientific and industry expertise to generate new knowledge and applied solutions for the mitigation of GHG emissions in sheep. GrassToGas will identify individual animal, feed and environmental attributes associated with feed and water intake efficiency for pasture-based sheep production systems. The potential impact would be relevant for the mitigation of GHG emissions within 5 - 10 years and beyond, by the application of the results from this project into sheep breeding programmes designed to produce cumulative reductions of GHG emissions of around 1-3% p.a.