Climatic hazard resilience assessment on livestock farms: Application to organic ruminant farms in the French Massif Central

CONTEXT

Climate change and increasing frequency of climatic perturbations could have acute impacts on the management and performances of organic farms in grassland areas. Resilience provides a framework for analyzing livestock systems in this context.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this work was to propose an indicator and a novel approach to assess the resilience of organic-certified cattle and sheep farms to climatic hazards, objectivize the impacts of observed climatic hazards on agricultural practices, and define the main determinants of this resilience.

METHODS

We used technical, and economic data from 36 specialized cattle and sheep organic farms in the Massif Central (a mountain area in the centre of France) monitored between 2014 and 2020 together with meteorological data. Gross value added of the farms was used as a proxy of resilience. We used partial least squares (PLS) path modeling to analyze relationships between agroclimatic indicators, farming practices and gross value added, and then hierarchical clustering to construct a typology of farms with different levels of resilience.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

The gross value added of the studied farms was strongly positively linked to herd output and negatively linked to feed purchased. Good weather conditions for autumn grazing and grass harvesting had a negative impact on variation in forage production, feed purchases and consumption of preserved forage. Bad weather conditions for crop yields had a positive impact on consumption of preserved forage and/or grazed grass. The feeding strategies were influenced by the on-farm production of preserved forage and by off-farm feed purchases. Farmers who took advantage of good weather conditions for grass by maximizing grazing without increasing production were able to maintain the gross value added of their farm. A strategy to increase the gross value added in years where weather conditions are unfavourable to grass production was to maximize herd output even if it meant increasing forage stocks and feed purchases.

SIGNIFICANCE

Adapting livestock production systems to climate change is a major ongoing challenge for livestock sustainability. There is a dearth of observational studies and a lack of methods and indicators for investigating and assessing the climate resilience of livestock systems. This study adopted a novel original approach to address this gap by pairing technical-economic data from livestock farms with meteorological data from weather stations.