Description
Growing public concern regarding accelerated rates of climate change, the depletion and degradation of natural resources such as biodiversity water and soils, coupled with policy commitments to address these challenges, are placing increasing pressures to enhance sustainability metrics associated with agriculture in general, and ruminant production systems in particular. At EU and indeed global scale, there has probably never before been so many potentially conflicting challenges for agriculture. On one hand, agricultural systems need to produce more, to feed the increasing global human population, while at the same time being much less reliant on economically and environmentally costly chemical inputs and protecting natural resources. Within this paper we provide an overview of recent research that demonstrates the potential contributions that legume inclusion within grass swards can make to developing more sustainable and resilient ruminant productions systems.
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Legumes as a Biological Tool to Address the Sustainability of Ruminant Production Systems
Growing public concern regarding accelerated rates of climate change, the depletion and degradation of natural resources such as biodiversity water and soils, coupled with policy commitments to address these challenges, are placing increasing pressures to enhance sustainability metrics associated with agriculture in general, and ruminant production systems in particular. At EU and indeed global scale, there has probably never before been so many potentially conflicting challenges for agriculture. On one hand, agricultural systems need to produce more, to feed the increasing global human population, while at the same time being much less reliant on economically and environmentally costly chemical inputs and protecting natural resources. Within this paper we provide an overview of recent research that demonstrates the potential contributions that legume inclusion within grass swards can make to developing more sustainable and resilient ruminant productions systems.
