While in this space I like to muse about things about ranching and agriculture, this edition of my column is pretty serious, but may be important.
Apparently, young or new entrants to farming/ranching tend to diversify more while those of us retiring tend to scale down operations. I am trying not to “resemble” these findings.
According to a yet-to-be published paper for which I was interviewed, a search of studies on farming systems reports on a 2017 paper reviewing 37 academic articles.
It found that the majority (87 per cent) of studies showed agricultural systems that deliberately combine two or more of the three possible components of agriculture (crop, livestock, and/or forests) to be associated with greater farm resilience to climate change.
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The paper measured integration as richness (the count of products from an agricultural system) and diversity (a metric dependent on number of products from an agricultural system, as well as their evenness with respect to outputs).
Studies that tracked farm outcomes over longer periods of time — long enough to account for climate variability — demonstrated the strongest effect on resilience.
The positive association was the same for tropical and non-tropical regions. Only one study found an exclusively negative association with resilience. The studies that used profit as an indicator of resilience all showed a positive association, while those that used yield were not always clear.
The scientific literature most often refers to diversification as “farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in the order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination.”
As captured in this definition, diversification can be at different scales (e.g. plot, farm, and landscape).
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It can be spatial (e.g. intercropping, mixed farming), and it can be temporal (e.g. crop rotation).
In other words, through time they had different crops and/or in different fields they had different crops.
Here are examples of diversification:
1.) Mixed species pastures for livestock.
2.) Perennial grains (which don’t need to be planted annually (much of this is under development) for human food and animal feed.
3.) Cover crops to fill “temporal niches,” i.e. waiting for a perennial crop to grow up to maturity like planting an oat crop and planting the final crop at the same time, so there is no waiting for the second crop to grow, as it starts immediately just matures in later seasons than the oats.
4.) Different livestock grazing locations for different seasons.
5.) Early and late maturing varieties of a crop.
So what am I doing reading studies about ranching and farming when on holidays. I guess I am passionate about my field!
David Zirnhelt is a rancher and member of the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association. He is also chair of the Advisory Committee for the Applied Sustainable Ranching Program at TRU.
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