Crop-Livestock Farming Systems Assessment in Europe

Whatever the scale of approach or methods used, the same trends can be seen:

- Integration between crops and livestock often leads to a decrease in productivity of the farm.

- Environmental performance have improved overall but not necessarily for all impact categories and with a very significant effect of the functional unit used.

- Indeed, if we favor the function of land cultivation and that the results are expressed per ha used, the environmental impacts are almost always reduced in the ICLS.

- But if we favor the production function and that the results are expressed per unit of product, then the results are much less clear and vary from case to case. It must however be said that in this mode of expression of results, the fact of dividing the overall impacts to the quantities of product leaving the farm inevitably leads to disadvantage farms which self-produce feed for their herds. This artifact does not affect the general results but is causing a bias which can particularly affect the ICLS where precisely the self-production of feed is a major factor of integration between crops and livestock.